


The Rest of Us

by TheParafox



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure, Apocalypse, Blood and Gore, Emotional, F/F, F/M, Future Fic, Gen, I'm just mocking my own writing at this point, Infection, Naughty Dog - Freeform, Original Character(s), Post-Zombie Apocalypse, References to Google Maps, References to Naughty Dog games, References to thesaurus.com, References to zombie stories, United States, Violence, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-04-17 20:01:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 22
Words: 28,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4679516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheParafox/pseuds/TheParafox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ellie, held under ransom by a group of survivors, is forced to travel halfway across a post-pandemic U.S. with a diminishing party to rescue the rest of the survivors' faction. </p><p>Cover Art: http://imgur.com/fp4lV4F</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Day Before - The Forest

Her fingers danced over the guitar strings, plucking softly yet melodically. Perched on her boulder in the middle of the pond, she grazed her shoe on the water’s surface and watched the ripples echo.

          “If I ever were to lose you,  
          I'd surely lose myself  
          Everything I have found here,  
          I've not found by myself,  
          Try and sometimes you'll succeed,  
          To make this man of me  
          All of my stolen missing parts  
          I've no need for anymore

          I believe,  
          And I believe 'cause I can see,  
          Our future days,  
          Days of you and me,  
          You and me.”

Her bow and quiver lay next to her, her only audience aside from the mossy rocks dotting the water. Airborne spores from the fungus-encrusted marsh drifted up, mixing with the morning fog. If she were a normal person, she would be long dead from the exposure to the fungus. But as it happened, she’d suffered two bites from infected over the course of her life, one on the inside of her right arm and the other on the back of her left shin, and she’d breathed in and made contact with enough spores to mutate at least half of America. She was effectively immune.

Morning after morning was spent here, old songs played from the days when music motivated humans as much as food or drink. The environment always provided visually tainted yet acoustically beautiful surroundings.

An unusual noise caught her attention, and she held still. The footfalls of a line of people strode through the underbrush surrounding the pond, and she turned to see a unit of soldiers from the village clad in riot gear and gas masks.

The soldier in the lead gave her a quick once-over, then signaled to the others. “I found her!” She recognized the heavy voice of John, clouded from his gas mask. She might’ve identified him sooner, but the bulky riot gear blended with his immense stature. “There you are, Ellie. Tommy’s worried sick about you.”

Tommy had been pent up in his house for roughly a week, with nothing but sealed lips on his activities coming out; one such pair being that of John’s.  The village was starting to worry about him.

“Tommy can go fuck himself.”

“Excuse me?”

“Tommy knows I appreciate being alone. Either this is really fucking important, which I doubt it is, or you’re completely full of shit.”

“Ellie, it’s dangerous out here. Let’s go—”

She stood and faced him. “How many _fucking_ times do I have to tell you? _I can handle myself_. You think I haven’t learned anything about this world in the twenty-one goddamn years I’ve lived in it?”

John held up his hands. “Okay, I’m sorry. Tommy wanted to see you, so will you please come with us?”

Ellie collapsed back onto the rock cross-legged, and returned to her guitar. “No.”

He sighed, and tried again. “Ellie, I… What would Joel say?”

Ellie’s thumb slipped and the string produced a revolting, contemptuous noise. “John,” she warned, her voice weak. “Just… don’t.”

“For the love of god, Ellie. Tommy sent all of us out to find you. The least you can do is let us escort you back.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what he wants to say to me?”

 John’s gaze fell to his feet. “Any other time, I would, but he wants to tell you in person.”

Ellie hesitated. After a few seconds, she finally rose. “Fine.”

 

An elbow landed on Ellie’s shoulder as she followed the unit through the forest. “Hey, when I was your age, I was out partying every other night and sleeping every morning, saying, ‘the infection be damned!’ I’m surprised you’re never there when the college-age kids in the village are out gettin’ hammered.” He’d removed his gas mask, and it now swung carelessly from his hand. The forest directly surrounding the village was much clearer of spores and fog.

“Yeah, well. I was never really a drinker.”

“I guess not. Not much of a partyer, either.”

“What’s there to party about? Barely a fraction of humanity is alive. The infection is killing off what's left of the world. We have limited supplies, and we’ve emptied out most of the resources near here.” She wasn’t sure whether she or John stopped walking first, but she continued. “I get that you’re trying to find the light side of things, but I just don’t know if it’s worth it anymore. We’ve run out of things to fight for.”

John’s hands caressed her shoulders, and he angled his head down to meet her eyes. “Ellie. I don’t want to hear you say anything like that anymore. Okay? There are people here that still care about you, and about restoring humanity, myself included. ‘Endure and survive’; that’s your motto, right?”

She couldn’t deny it. She cast her gaze to the ground. Her feet fell in line with John’s as soon as she felt the pressure on her shoulders lift.

“You know, you’ve been pretty quiet and moody ever since we had to come down here to Colorado. You weren’t like this back in Wyoming.”

“You know damn well why.”

“Okay, yes, but is that the _only_ reason?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like home here. I mean, the old settlement wasn’t Boston by any means, but at least I felt like I belonged.”

John gave a solemn nod. “Just give it some time.”

That may as well have been John’s motto. But she didn’t argue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics from Future Days by Pearl Jam. Brendan O’Brien, 2013.


	2. The Day Before - Lake Village

The looming wooden gates of the village creaked open to allow the unit through. Due to the gradual drop in passing parties of both hunters and infected over the years, the gates were no longer kept locked, only closed. Shifts on watch were kept to a minimum for the same reason.

In the village, a meager handful of preoccupied citizens strolled in and out of houses, up and down the path to the lake, carrying jugs of fresh water or various tools. The community project since the settlement was established had been to build a working well system throughout it, and because of it there were always different patches of earth that were excavated. Until that was finished, the closest freshwater was the neighboring lake. Of course, it still needed to be purified, but over the years the population had been able to acquire the tools necessary to provide for itself.  

“Just head over to Tommy’s,” John told her. “I’ll meet you there. Here, I’ll take your guitar and bow.”

He did, and split off with the rest of the soldiers to their makeshift barracks, leaving the street to Ellie. Unsure what to expect, she stepped toward the house at the back corner of the village, gravel crunching beneath her shoes. Sidelong glances slipped from her eyes toward the people around her, a few of which acknowledged her with a nod or smile. Two young boys burst out in front of her, crossing the street, their eyes and feet occupied by a soccer ball.

Once she came into view of the dilapidated wood structure of Tommy’s house, she was met with a throng comprised of at least half the village screaming and shouting on the front lawn. The remainder of the village guard formed a barricade, preventing rioters from breaking into the house.

“Oh, shit,” John said, stopping beside her. “That didn’t take long.”

“Guess that’s what happens when your mayor hides away for days on end.”

“This coming from the mayor’s veritable niece who’s been doing the exact same thing.”

She cast him a sharp glance, but he was already walking toward the mob. “Come on.” He pushed and shoved his way through, his impressive frame no hindrance to his efforts.

Luke, effectively John’s second-in-command, spearheaded the defense. “John!” He said, letting Ellie and him slip through onto Tommy’s porch. “Thank god you’re here. There hasn’t been a riot like this since Esther’s suicide.”

“Go on in, Ellie.” John shooed her up to the door before turning back to join Luke.

She hesitated for a second before knocking. A shard of peeling brown paint dropped to the porch not so much like a shaving of wood as a shaving of lead. It slipped straight through a crack between the stripped boards.

A minute passed with frigid silence from inside and continuous uproar from behind, and she considered knocking again, but changed her mind and just opened the door herself. She shut it behind her, and after seeing the empty main floor, headed upstairs.

The door to Tommy’s room was ajar, and muffled voices echoed inside. She knocked, unintentionally pushing it open further.

“Tommy wanted to see me?”

Ben, the village’s easygoing doctor, turned and brightened. He swung the door open. “Ellie, you’re here! Good.”

Tommy lay on his bed, blankets up to his stomach. Next to him, his end table had been commandeered by Ben’s medical supply.   

Tommy smiled. “Hey there, Ellie.” Gray had crept further into his beard and hair, covering his head with a dirty silver-gold helmet. Under it, his face was drained of color.

Tossing Ben and Tommy alternating looks, she mustered the voice to ask, “What’s wrong?”

“Well,” Ben breathed, “in short, he’s sick. Now, along with that comes good news and bad news. The bad news is, I don’t have enough experience to know what exactly it is he’s fighting.”

Ellie’s mouth cracked open. “It’s not…”

He quickly shook his head. “No, he’s not infected. I know that much. But the good news is, and… Well, maybe this is stretching the meaning of the word ‘good’, but… he’ll be one of the lucky few to go from natural causes.”

A tiny gasp escaped, and already tears pushed at her eyes. “Tommy!” She rushed to him, collapsing to her knees and tossing her arms over him.

“Hey now,” he said, patting her hand and holding her cheek. “It’s alright. I’ve got a little while yet. You don’t have to cry now. Ben’s right, I’ll be one of the lucky few to die like we did almost thirty years ago.”

She sniffed back the tears. “But… Why didn’t you tell me earlier? Why keep it from everyone?”

Ben straightened some instruments on the end table. “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just something he could sleep off. And we decided to let you know before most of the village, since you were so close to Joel and Tommy.”

“Ellie, I…” Tommy started. “In the absence of Maria and Joel, I… As a last request, I’d like to spend some quality time with you in these next few days. I used to take care of Sarah, Joel’s daughter, a lot back then, and we would have all sorts of fun together. I miss those days.”

Ellie nodded.

“Why don’t you take John, and maybe Luke, and tomorrow, go find some movies, or music, or something in town. Something for us to do together.”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Alright. Thank you, Ellie. Now go find John and Luke and let them know.”

“Okay.”

 

John stood by the front window, glaring out. When he heard Ellie coming down the stairs, he quickly closed the distance between them, letting Ellie fall into his arms.

They exchanged a glance before Ellie looked away. “I’m sorry. I should’ve just come with you when you said.”

“Don’t worry about it. You know now, and we can tell everyone else tomorrow.”

“He said he wanted you, me, and Luke to go look for some movies and stuff in town tomorrow, so we could spend some extra time together.”

He nodded. “Yeah, we can do that. We’ll head out in the morning and be back by the time we tell everyone.” A pause went by. “Hey, you hungry?”

“Starving.”

“Why don’t you come on back to my place, and I’ll make you some lunch. We’ll grab Luke too, and we can talk about where we want to look around. Sound good?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.”


	3. Day One - Town

A cluster of pigeons fluttering away provided the only sounds. There wasn’t even wind to send garbage adrift like tumbleweeds.

Armed with a magnum and revolver respectively, John and Luke alternated kicking down doors or smashing in windows to access the shops lining the streets.

John was a walking bulwark at about six feet five inches and two-hundred-some pounds of thick muscle, and a deserving leader of the village’s defense. His short black hair was mussed from wearing his riot helmet so often, and his beard was beginning to hide his mouth.

Luke was about ten years younger than John and two-thirds his size. Though only a few years Ellie’s senior, he possessed extensive leadership qualities and acted as a top advisor to John. He had a level face, with eyes slightly further apart than average, though that didn’t detract from his handsomeness. He was often commended for his advocacy of equal rights for everyone in the village, and constantly found himself reminding others that everyone was entitled to a vote.

They’d left their heavy riot gear in the village, having been through the town area many times and marking it clear of infected, but had taken along gas masks out of both precaution and habit. Ellie of course needed no such filter. She had her bow and 9mm pistol, though she doubted she’d need either.

They skipped over most shops, their being ravaged to no end or unyielding in their search for entertainment.

After a while they found a store that once either sold or rented movies. Scattered shards of glass coated the sidewalk outside and carpet inside, and the frame that had once held it all showed numerous dents and bends. The only reason they knew it was a movie store was from the dusty letters “VIDEO” above the skeletal void where once there was glass coated with posters.

“Well, here we go,” Luke said, appraising the sign.

“Careful, there’s a lot of glass,” John said, stepping over cloudy shards, piles of dirt, and broken metal shelves in almost equal quantity. Ellie followed him, and began picking through overturned isles for intact cases or discs.

Under some rubble were a few cases, most having been stripped of both disc and cover. Of the mere two that still had covers, the first was quite faded, but she could make out a bandolier-wearing man wielding a pistol, looking like he’d just been through hell, and the letters “UN” above him; the rest of the word torn off.

The second, while also slightly faded, struck a familiar chord in her. It depicted a werewolf-esque man holding a raven-haired girl in his arms, and was titled, “Dawn of the Wolf, Part 1”. At first she couldn’t understand why it looked so familiar, then she remembered, all those seven years ago, seeing billboard after billboard advertising Part 2, and how, when she saw one, she excitedly asked Joel if the girl gets gutted by the end, to which he said no; it was just a dumb teen movie.

She stuffed it in her backpack and moved on to another part of the store.

“Can’t seem to find anything that isn’t broken beyond recognition,” John muttered, shuffling through stripped and cracked cases.

“I suppose that oughtta be expected, though,” Luke said. “Infection breaks out, people get quarantined or have to hide from those things, and they need something to do.”

Ellie stood, hiking her backpack up on her shoulders, and clambered her way out of the store. “This place sucks. Let’s keep moving.” John and Luke silently agreed, walking after her.

As they approached the intersection on the sidewalk, John held up a hand, signaling them to stop. Listening, they picked up footsteps around the corner. The corner building was boarded up tight, so they couldn’t tell who was there. The three raised their weapons and stepped back.

Five armed men burst around the corner, rifles and shotguns raised. “Drop your weapons!” “Hands in the air!” “Get in the middle of the street!”

Outgunned, they had no choice. The men ignored Ellie’s party’s relinquished weapons, bringing them to the middle of the street and ordering them to their knees.

As soon as they were, a beast of a man among them with brown skin and a bald head launched his knee into John’s chest, knocking the air from his lungs and sending him rolling across the blacktop. Luke and Ellie sprung to their feet, shouting his name, but the men yelled back and shoved them to the ground.

They watched as John scrambled to his feet only to receive a fist thrust into his nose. Blood streamed down his face, and as the beast approached, John rammed his boot into the man’s shin. He fell to one knee, upon which he crawled forward and sent a volley of punches at John’s face.

Just then a sixth man came sprinting into the scene, empty hands extended, shouting, “Whoa whoa whoa, Michael Michael _Michael_!” Rushing up to the fight, he grabbed the beast’s wrist and pulled him off the bloodied John. “What are you doing? You’re scaring the bejesus out of them! I’m gone not even five minutes and what’re you doing? Shoving guns in their faces and beating the shit out of them? Put those down!” He commanded, throwing the barrels of their weapons toward the asphalt. A couple of them pulled down bandanas and Ellie realized that they were women.

The man hurriedly pulled up John from the ground and offered him a bandana, which he quickly put to use on his crooked nose.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “My name is Nathaniel, and this is part of my little group of survivors. They don’t usually act like this, I promise.” His voice was smooth and formal, but naturally so.

John was too stunned—or too injured—to say anything right away.

Ellie and Luke found the courage to stand, and were met with nothing but acknowledging glances upon doing so. “What are you, Fireflies?” Ellie asked.

“Fireflies?” One of the women said. “Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in a while.”

“Been about six or seven years,” another in the group said.

Nathaniel shook his head. “We’re just survivors. But _apparently_ ,” he shot a contemptuous glare at the beast that had assaulted John, “some of us have different ways of ‘surviving’ than others.” Noticing the pistols and bow on the sidewalk, he went to retrieve them. As he turned, Ellie saw a kukri strapped to his leg. “So,” he said as he was walking, “what are your names?” He picked up the weapons and eyed them, walking back. Upon seeing our untrusting grimaces, he nodded and handed the guns to the man next to him. “I see. Well, as it happens, my group here is running low on provisions. Since you’re here, would you mind telling us where your camp is?”

“Give us our weapons back, and we’ll tell you,” John offered.

“Mm-mm. I don’t think so. How about the other way around?”

John exchanged glances with Luke. “University of Eastern Colorado.”

“Oh, okay,” Nathaniel said. “Tell you what, why don’t you show us the way?”

Caught in his bluff, John let his gaze fall.

“It’s not true,” Luke breathed. “Our village is just south of here.”

Nathaniel’s eyes widened as he looked at Luke. “ _Really?_ ” He feigned deep interest. “Is that right?” He turned back to John. Out of nowhere he kicked in John’s knee, felling him. His kukri found its way into his grasp, and he gripped John’s hand. “I’m an honest man, you see. And I’m gonna make you an honest deal. I’ll take one finger for every time you lie to me. And I’ll take one hand for every time you cause trouble on the way to your village.” And in a swift slice removed John’s left index finger.

His screams filled the empty street, and Luke and Ellie sprung to action, but were inexplicably grabbed and held tight by members of Nathaniel’s group.

Nathaniel inspected the dripping finger for a second, then discarded it amongst the ruins of the shops behind him. “You bring me to your village, I'll give your weapons back, and I won’t take any more hands or fingers. Deal?”


	4. Day One - Village Woods

Nathaniel followed Luke’s lead. He didn’t make it obvious, but everyone knew he had a handgun of his own in addition to the kukri strapped to his leg.

John had retied the bandana tight around his hand, leaving his face encrusted with streaks of dried blood. The beast referred to as Michael kept a tight grip on him at all times.

Ellie shuffled along in the midst of the group, head held low. She watched Luke, wondering if he would bring them straight to the village or into some hastily concocted trap.

Twigs snapped beneath their feet as they traipsed through the forest surrounding the village. Normally the woods were choked with the sounds of nature; birds trilling, bugs whirring, squirrels rustling in the underbrush. But now it was eerily soundless.

After rummaging through their packs, Nathaniel's group tossed them back, having taken only their snacks. One of the women now chewed on Ellie’s energy bar.

Aside from Michael, none of the group’s appearances particularly stood out. Nathaniel’s only defining features were slick black hair and a shadow of stubble. Both women had long dark hair, though one was of Mexican descent and a bit younger, maybe Luke’s age. One of the men had spiky frosted hair, the other short curly brown. The latter couldn’t have been any older than Ellie.

The trip felt slow, and she wasn’t sure if it was just her or Luke intentionally taking his time.

Before she even realized they were there, Luke halted and pointed at a wooden structure a few hundred feet away. “It’s right there.”

Nathaniel spun to face the group. “Good, let’s stop here. I have a business proposition to make.” Members of the group selected various trees to lean against. He glanced around, though his gaze seemed to pass over everyone’s heads. “So, as a little exposition, we came from way up in Wisconsin, just a big group of friends and some family. We're travelling west in the hopes of finding a good place to make a home, and we come across the Mall of America, just south of the Twin Cities. And we figure, hey,” he chuckled, “we have a whole fucking _mall_ to ourselves.” His smile fell. “We go in, and the place is literally _crawling_ with infected. The walls are _layered_ with pastel mushrooms, a real beautiful kind of death. We end up trapping ourselves, and suddenly there are _so many goddamn infected_. A good chunk of the group is forced to run off a different direction, and the group I’m with is chased all the way out of the mall and to the edge of the state. The leader of our group at the time decides fuck 'em, they’re dead anyway. And we kept on, because no one had the balls to say anything. And here we are now, in the middle of Colorado.

“So here’s my proposition: you three, plus three of my guys, go up to Minnesota and bring back the rest of my group.”

John stared at Nathaniel, shaking his head, stunned by his sheer stupidity. “What in God’s holy name makes you think they’re still alive?”

Without missing a beat Nathaniel pulled a radio out of his back pocket and held it up. “One of the guys up there has one of these from when our group first joined together. We give them a call every so often to check on them.”

“You’re full of shit,” Ellie said.

Nathaniel laughed. “Honey, I’m the most honest man I know. Tell you what, I'll call them right now.” He fiddled with the buttons on it and extended the antenna. “Alex? Alex, you there? Alex.” After a few seconds, sound came from the other end.

“Yeh? It's Alex. This Nathaniel?”

“It is. How're you holding up?”

“Pretty good. Finally got that old storage locker open in the back of that shop, and it turns out it was full of preserved food. How 'bout you?” It sounded fake, but that may have just been the way he talked.

“Pretty good as well. Good to hear you're surviving. We'll call again soon.” He switched off the radio and stared at Ellie, daring her to call him out again. 

“So why don’t you go rescue them yourselves?” John asked.

“We don’t have enough food to support ourselves, and we don't need to split up our group any more than we already have. The boys here owe us a rather large favor, and I think this is a worthy repayment.”

“You think _we'll_ have enough food?” Luke chided. “It’s six people either way.”

“Is it?” Nathaniel said, then gestured somewhere into the woods. As soon as he did, camouflaged people revealed themselves all around them. They stood up from the forest floor and stepped out from behind trees. In all, there were at least fifteen, all armed in some manner: rifles, handguns, eve knives. “Allow me to clarify the deal. The majority of our group is sick, and unfit for yet another cross-country trek. We’ll give you enough provisions to scrape by, and with any luck you’ll be able to pick up some food on the way. In the meantime, we’ll be here, watching over your village. We’ll give you… mmm… a month and a half to bring them back. If time runs out, or you return empty-handed, we slaughter the village.”

Chills ran up Ellie’s spine and down her arms.

“That goes for my guys, too. If you come back because you killed these three, we’ll put your heads on spikes. Tell you what, we’ll even give you the radio, so you can reassure yourselves that they are, in fact, alive and well.”

“How do we know you won’t kill our people as soon as we leave?” Luke asked, rage burning in his eyes.

Nathaniel eyed him apologetically. “The truth is, you don’t. All you have is my word that I—that _we_ —will not so much as touch them unless forty-five days pass or you return without the rest of my group.”

“This is such bullshit,” Ellie said. 

John wrenched out of Michael’s grip. “She’s right, you’re just sending us out to get killed.”

“If I wanted you dead, then why haven’t I killed you yet? Think of it this way: either you and your village all die, or you save my guys and risk that I’m telling the truth.”

“No,” John shook his head, “I’m gonna risk that you’re bullshitting me right now!” He lunged at Nathaniel, landing a punch on his face that sent him staggering.

“John, stop!” Luke shouted.

Michael was on John in a second. But before he could get his arms around him, John planted a kick in his groin. Half the group had their weapons up and aimed at John, but Nathaniel stopped them before they fired. He drew his kukri, approaching the aggravated defense leader. “Don’t move.”

This time Michael was able to knock John to the ground and gag him with his own scarf. Nathaniel motioned to the other two guys, and Luke and Ellie felt their all-too-familiar grasp on their arms. Nathaniel grabbed John’s right wrist and laid his hand on a felled log. He lifted the kukri above his head, high enough to let the morning sun shine off its blade, and drove it down. The sickening crunch was followed shortly by muffled screams.

Luke’s and Ellie’s mouths were immediately held shut by their captors.

Nathaniel stood, eyeing his handiwork. “That ought to keep you from making trouble. Someone get him a fucking bandage.” He stepped up to John’s tightly-held comrades. “You never want to mess with an honest man, because he will do _exactly_ what he says he will do.” Turning back to the camouflaged troop, he shook blood off his kukri. “Bring me a couple ration packs.” Two backpacks were promptly handed to him, and he shoved them into the arms of Luke and Ellie, who were then released from captivity by the men.

Michael yanked the bandaged John to his feet and flung him in the direction of his new party.

“Get your asses moving, or we’ll just slaughter everyone now,” Nathaniel ordered.

“Fuckin’ A,” Ellie muttered under her breath as she fell in step behind the people she would be getting to know far better than she cared to in the next month and a half.


	5. Day One - Interstate 76

The sun’s heavy rays beat upon them as they trekked along the freeway northeast. Puddles in the distance reflected off the asphalt, but when they neared them, they were sucked into the fissures of the road.

The ration bags Nathaniel had given them were carried by Michael and Luke. Everyone else save for John had their own bag; Ellie her backpack, the frosty-haired man a one-strap, and the younger guy a messenger bag.

“So,” frosty-hair said, “Y’all gonna tell us your names, or what?”

A couple of them glanced at him as if they weren't sure what he’d said.

“Alright, fine, I’ll go first. Name’s Terry.” He set a hand on the younger guy’s shoulder. “This is Logan, and that’s Michael.” He gestured to the massive man.

“I’m Luke,” Luke said. “John, and Ellie.” He pointed to them. Logan winked at Ellie, and she flipped him off with her glare.

Terry turned and began walking backwards to face the group. “I was real young when the infection hit, but I still remember life before. It was nice, real pretty all over, but in a different way. The boundaries were clearer. Most everything was where you’d want it to be. Know what I mean? Back when there were enough soldiers to uphold that ‘martial law’ shit, I never understood—”

“How about you shut up and give us our weapons back already?” John demanded. “Your ‘honest leader’ promised us them if we brought you to the village, and we did.”

A wicked smirk took Terry’s face. “Yeah, _he_ promised. Hell, _he’s_ the honest one, not me. You need to earn ‘em.” He raised an eyebrow at John’s maimed hands. “’Sides, you’d have a hell of a time pulling a trigger.”

At that, Logan snickered. “We got the guns, we make the rules.” And Terry commenced whistling a looping tune as he turned back around.

 

After the sun had fallen, the group took residence at a barn that had perhaps once been a sturdy, vibrant red structure. Twenty-seven years of neglect had dried its color to a dreary brown and provided a veritable feast for the insects.

Their evening meal finished, the group sat cautiously around a dying fire, separated by relationship, as if each waiting for the other trio to make the first move.

Logan was apparently struck by an amusing thought, as a grim smile revealed itself. “We could simply kill you all now. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about this awkward tension.”

“And what would you stand to gain from that?” John asked.

“The satisfaction of travelling with only a few friends.”

“We stand a better chance together,” Luke said.

“There’s no such thing as chance,” Logan declared, his gravelly voice suddenly evident. That statement rang within Ellie, and she shivered. “As long as you have skill, you have control.”

John leapt to his feet. “Then do it already! Kill us and rescue your goddamn friends yourselves!”

“No!” Luke stood. “No, don’t. There is no reason to get rid of half the group for no reason other than to declare power. None of us can return without the rest of the group, so why make it harder on yourselves to bring them back?”

Logan began laughing. “You tick so easily. It’s amusing.”

John and Luke lowered themselves back onto the ground, frustrated at Logan and themselves for having been so easily riled.

 

The six spread hay down in the barn by the light of the remnant embers. Michael, Terry, and Logan collapsed almost immediately, and John gestured Luke and Ellie come close.

“We’ve got a couple options,” he whispered. “We can kill them, take their weapons and food, and run.”

“Fucking run where?” Ellie asked. “You saw how many assholes were hiding. If one of them saw us come back, they’d blow our damn heads off.”

Ignoring her, John continued. “Option two, we try and build some trust with them. For now, we can take shifts sleeping to make sure we all wake up in one piece tomorrow. Option three, we kill them, or don’t; we take their stuff, and we go on the rescue mission ourselves. This way we don’t have to worry about this trust drama, and we’ll likely get done a lot faster.”

Luke frowned. “I don’t know, I’m thinking option two is the best way to go for right now. Who knows, maybe they’ll lighten up.”

John nodded, and they looked to Ellie for input. “Let’s give it some time,” she said.

“I have to agree,” John said. “It’s probably a little early for judgment. Luke, you wanna take first watch?”

“I can,” Ellie offered.

“Alright, Ellie’s on first, then Luke, then me, three hour shifts.” He took off his watch and set it between them. “Wake the next person when it’s their turn.”

Ellie lay down on her pile of hay and held her eyes open. It wasn’t hard to stay awake, as the hay and dirt was less than comfortable. _Three hours,_ she thought. _That’s not too bad. Might as well get it over with right away._

Every little rustle startled her, but eventually everyone became still. She felt the time crawl, staring at the rotting rafters, hoping her shift would end soon.

 

A hollow wooden clunking noise caught her attention, and she snapped her head up to see Nathaniel’s men missing from their positions. Just then a thick cloth was stuffed into her mouth, and she was grasped tight and carried, struggling, out of the barn and into the black of night.

She was dropped onto hard-packed earth, sharp grass pricking her hands and neck. Resilient claws pinned her arms above her head, and Logan crawled over her on his knees, rolling his sleeves up. The crisp moon exposed his menacing face.

“Have any sweet dreams?” His voice was grinding.

Ellie screamed muffled curses, desperate to gain the attention of the sleeping men.

“That’s too bad. Because I’m about to give you nightmares.” He pushed up her shirt and twisted at the button of her jeans. She jerked around as much as possible, but he had a tight hold of her legs with his own. He finally undid the button, and promptly groped for the zipper. Just as he grabbed it, Ellie felt his leg loosen on hers, and she pulled out her foot and drove it into his chest. When he recovered, his tongue on his lips, she flung her heel up to his chin. A suppressed snap sounded, and a stream of blood spat from his mouth. This time he fell onto his back, and Ellie twisted out of the other man’s grip.

She flipped out her knife, spun around, and tackled Terry. She swung with wild precision, landing several clean slashes across his bare arms.

Behind her, Logan pushed himself up and stalked toward them. Turning over, Ellie readied a swing, but he took hold of her shirt and dragged her up to her feet. She stabbed with her knife, but he caught her wrist. The opposing pressure caused their hands to shudder violently, and Logan used her force to his advantage, twirling around to her backside so he was pulling the knife in and she was holding it away.

His strength brought the tip within inches of her neck. Terry had clambered to his feet, and now assessed his scars. “Oho, bitch, you'll pay for this!”

Before he could deliver a punishment, the force pulling Ellie's own knife toward her dissipated. She instinctively sidestepped away to see Michael slam Logan's head into the dirt, kidney punch Terry, then drop his elbow on his back.

Astonished, Ellie could only watch as the beast leapt toward her and struck her throat with the edge of his hand. And then consciousness dropped away. 


	6. Day Two - Fort Morgan

Ellie jolted awake and took in her surroundings. She was in the barn, on her meager pile of hay, John and Luke still sleeping next to her, Nathaniel’s men on the brink of waking.

 _What had just happened?_ Ellie wondered. _Was I… Did they actually…?_ She was fully clothed, and the only thing unusual was her undone button, which she fixed. Even her knife bulged in her pocket.

 _Was it all just a nightmare?_ That would’ve explained Michael saving her. Unless it was John- but why would he knock her out like that?

 _Terry’s arms._ She looked, but he was wearing his jacket. She couldn’t come up with a worthy excuse to see his arms fast enough to check.

John groaned and rolled over, then immediately snapped awake. “Oh shit,” he muttered. He bounded up, tapping Luke’s shoulder. “Luke, Ellie, come here, now.” Rubbing sleep out of their eyes, they hurriedly followed him out and over to the remains of their fire pit. “What the hell happened to our shifts? Why was I not woken up?”

Luke’s eyes widened in worry. “I wasn’t woken either. Ellie, what—”

“They tried to rape me!” She said, hoping her voice wouldn’t catch the others’ attention.

“Oh, that is _it_.” John’s face hardened, and he thundered toward the men.

“John, wait, stop!” Ellie called, grabbing his elbow. “It might’ve been a dream. I might’ve fallen asleep. I remember the huge guy beating up the others before knocking me out too.”

“I don’t care, I need an excuse.” He pulled out of her grip.

“John! I fought them with my knife, and when I woke up, it was here in my pocket. If it actually happened, there’s no way they would give it back.”

John finally stopped. Ellie took that time to show him the knife. “Fine then,” he said. “You were dreaming. The fact that you were dreaming about it still means you’re afraid of them.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

In the barn, Logan got to his feet, and Terry sat up and yawned.

John exhaled. “Alright, one more wrong move, and we end their journey.” The three then casually returned to the barn to pick up their bags.

“It’s walkin’ time, fellas. Michael, wake your ass up!” Terry ordered, kicking the sleeping mass.

Ellie was struck with an idea. “What time is it?” She looked directly at Terry, hoping for an involuntary glance at his wrist in the hopes of seeing scars. But John beat him to it.

“Quarter after seven.”

Disheartened, she fell into step alongside him and Luke.

 

Hours later they entered a small town alongside the freeway. Within, buildings lay cracked open, ivy flourishing through them. Grass blanketed the ground, young trees bursting through the asphalt.

Vehicles were peppered around the area, some parked, some collided with shops and houses, all rusted to oblivion.

“Alriiight,” Terry cheered. “Shit to loot!” Taking shotgun in hand, he stepped up to the first shop and pounded the door with the stock. It swung wide, hanging on a single hinge.

Instantly spores billowed out, and Terry jumped back.

“Uh, haha, not that one.” They followed him further into town, spreading out to look for themselves.

Distant clicking of infected echoed over the rooftops, and the group froze.

“They’re at the edge of town,” Logan said. He turned to Ellie’s group. “You haven’t backstabbed us yet. You deserve to be able to defend yourselves. Terry, get over here.”

Under his jacket, Terry wore only a sleeveless undershirt, and as Logan reached into his backpack, Ellie caught sight of a handful of fresh scars on his shoulder. Logan produced John’s Desert Eagle, and without care for who ended up with it, he tossed it vaguely in Ellie’s direction.

Ellie snatched it, turned, and fired an earsplitting round into Michael’s skull. The beast sunk like a brick dropped into water.

“FUCKIN’ AYE, BITCH!” Terry screamed, nearly dropping the shotgun. He wasn’t the only one cursing, but he was definitely the loudest. Logan leveled his rifle at her head.

Before any more triggers could be pulled, the heartless cries of infected resounded around almost every nearby building. Terry’s and Logan’s eyes couldn’t be bothered to keep steady aim on Ellie with the threat of clickers in each direction.

Then swarms spilled from the woodwork. Agonizing, deafening clicking enclosed the group. The fungal humanoids collectively charged in, and John was first to spot an exterior staircase leading to the second story of a building.

The group sprinted after him, the big guns now firing into the crowd. Atop the stairs, John rammed through a door on rusty hinges. Piling inside, they found themselves in a dusty room with sparse pieces of furniture covered in plastic. Along one wall were tall, broken open windows.

“Terry!” Logan shouted. The two switched guns, and Logan took a position clearing the stairs. Luke pulled out a bottle of rubbing alcohol from his pack, tore off the bandana from John’s hand and stuffed it in, lit it with his lighter, and cast it down to the base of the stairs, where a shower of flames erupted. The squeals of the infected rose sharply in pitch.

Terry swung the rifle’s stock against Ellie’s head, and she hit the far wall, the magnum slipping from her hand. “Yo, bitch! How ‘bout you wake the fuck up, huh? Did you fuckin’ HEAR the fuckin’ clicking all around us? You TRYIN’ to get us all eaten alive? ‘Cause it’s workin’!”

Ellie shoved him back. “You tried to _rape_ me, asshole!”

“Yeah, and _Michael_ beat the shit out of _all_ of—UH!” John’s fist collided with Terry’s face. Ellie flipped out her knife and charged him, plunging the blade into his chest. Her momentum thrust them against the window, lodging broken glass in the backs of Terry’s legs and plunging them out the window and against the blacktop. If the knife’s impalement didn’t kill him, the impact against his skull definitely did.

“Ellie!” Cried John, as he then jumped and rolled upon landing. Luke’s impromptu Molotov had taken care of most of the clickers, and Logan was now visible through the window, glancing around but not taking aim. Ellie scooped up her own pistol from Terry’s backpack and targeted Logan, watching for any sudden moves.

Logan twitched at the sight of a gun on him, and Luke took off through another door, slamming it behind him. Instead of pursuing him, Logan leapt down from the window and rolled, imitating John.

Evidently presenting himself as non-hostile, Logan rushed over to Michael’s body for the radio and ration pack and slung the latter over his shoulders. “Let’s go!”

Ellie snatched up her bow and quiver from Terry’s body and ran. John’s long and muscled legs brought him to the lead, and, more infected on their heels, he tore open a windowless metal door, hoping for a shortcut. But what presented itself was not so much a shortcut as it was an infected incubation chamber. A trio of clickers and two colossal bloaters, with fungal plates like armor, trampled over John. An elephantine foot fell upon his head, and a series of bones cracked. His body went limp.

His name reverberated out of Ellie’s mouth without her even realizing it.

“Ellie! This way!” She hardly heard him, but nevertheless found herself racing behind him. Her oncoming tears didn’t even have time to form.

An overturned bus blocked the only way not flooded with infected, but that proved no obstacle for Logan. Fungal pods thrown by the bloaters exploded behind him as he bounded right up the underside, finding footing on the axles. Ellie attempted to do the same, but couldn’t match his speed.

“Take my hand!” He extended his arm down.

“FUCK YOU!”

“ELLIE. Take my goddamn hand!”

She rolled her eyes and took hold of his wrist. As soon as she did, she was hoisted up and was able to find footing. The two leapt off the other side and hit the ground running.


	7. Day Two - Sawmill

The two finally slowed down a mile or so out.

Ellie immediately turned and took a step back toward town. “Luke,” she uttered, gasping for breath.

“Wait!” Logan said, trying to grab her arm but missing. He keeled over, hands on his knees. “Too, many, infected,” he said between breaths. “He had, a ration pack. The rifle, and the pistols, are still there. He’ll live.” He crouched down, leaning on the shotgun for support.

Ellie spun back to him and raised her gun. “I should just kill you now,” she exhaled.

He threw out a careless hand, palm-up, inviting her. “Go right ahead. You won’t make it all the way by yourself.”

“Why didn’t I just shoot you first?” She wondered aloud, shaking her head. She felt her breathing beginning to calm.

“That is a damn good question.” He stared straight ahead, at nothing in particular. “But I’m glad you made the choice you did.”

“Asshole.”

He laughed. “I’m just being honest.”

“Oh, I’m sure your buddy Nathaniel would be proud.” The gun got heavy, and she hesitantly lowered it.

They sat for a solid five minutes catching their breath and mustering the energy to do or say anything more. Ellie inhaled deep and let it out slowly, then stood to her full height.

“We have to go back,” she declared.

“No.” He stood. “It’s not worth the risk. There are two possible scenarios: either your friend is able to fight off enough infected to grab everything off of Terry worth grabbing and survive easily, or he was torn to pieces as soon as we ran.”

“I thought you said there was no such thing as chance?”

“I did, but I haven’t seen Luke in action enough to make an accurate prediction.”

“Then let’s wait here for a day and see if he finds us. He knows which way we came in, so it only makes sense that we would keep heading east.”

Logan shook his head. “We don’t have the time or the food to spare. The faster we rescue the rest of my group, the better everything goes for all of us.” He began following the white line on the road.

Ellie didn’t move. “Well, can’t we at least wait for a few minutes?”

He glanced over his shoulder to her without stopping. “I thought yousaid you wanted to save your village?”

As much as she hated to admit it, he was right. If Luke were still alive, they probably would’ve seen or heard some evidence of it by now. And they didn’t have time to waste.  

 

No words were exchanged until the sun began its descent, blanketing the horizon in orange.

“Why did Michael save me from you and Terry?”

Logan gave her an evaluating look, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it. “He wasn’t saving you. He… It’s…” It was the first time she’d heard him stumble on a sentence. “Every once in a while, he would have outbursts of rage. They didn’t last long, and he didn’t have them very often, but when he did, he would go savage on anyone near him. As one might say, you ‘got lucky’. Almost in both meanings of the phrase.”

She glared at him, but he wasn’t looking. “That night, I attacked you with my knife, but when I woke up, it was back in my pocket.” She let the implied question hang between them.

Logan held his mouth open for a second, not meeting her eyes. When he did, he said, “consider that an apology.”

This time Ellie’s mouth fell open. “I’m not gonna just forgive you for trying to _rape_ me.”

“I’m not looking for forgiveness.”

“Then what are you looking for?” She asked before bothering to consider whether she cared or not.

His gaze was cemented on the horizon. “An opportunity to feel powerful.”

She paused before asking her next question. “And you can’t do that with the infected?”

“The infected are twisted and mindless beasts. They lack the ability to understand and comprehend. You can’t see the fear in their eyes when they realize that _you’re in control_.”    

“So that’s what excites you? Control over people?”

He seemed to confirm without actually saying so. “I had a big family with lots of siblings. I never got to choose anything for myself; I was always being told what to do and how to do it. They always got to see the fear in my eyes staring back at them when they harassed me and ordered me around. And I got jealous.”

Ellie waited for him to continue, but when he didn’t, a morbid thought occurred to her, and she froze. “Did you…?”

He finally met her eyes, something dark twisting behind them. “Yes. I did. But it was more than worth it to finally see the sheer terror in their eyes after so many years.”

Her voice faltered when she spoke. “You’re a sick asshole.”

A smirk pulled on the edge of his lips, sending shivers down Ellie’s spine. “I know.”

That was it, she decided. She couldn’t go another night sleeping mere feet away from a psychopath. She was done keeping alert at all times. She would not deal with him any longer.

Before either of them realized what had happened, Ellie’s knife was implanted into Logan’s abdomen.

He glared down at it, stunned, then popped his head back up and yelled, “BOO!” Ellie jumped, and he raised the shotgun before she could retrieve her knife, but not before she landed a foot in his groin.

Taking off down the road, she aimed for what appeared to be a run-down sawmill. It was a little ways off, and she heard Logan’s pounding footsteps behind her. Ellie awaited the inevitable discharge of the shotgun, followed by the paralyzing agony of having a hole bored through her at 1600 feet per second. But all she heard was the slapping of their shoes against the potholed road and her arrows rustling against each other in their quiver.

Then she remembered her pistol. She drew it from the waistband of her jeans and fired a few half-assed shots at Logan. She would’ve fired more, but the clip ran out, and she slipped it in her backpack as she reached the sawmill.

She ducked inside the open doorway, breathing hard, waiting for him to appear. Footsteps approached, but stopped just short of the doorway.

A second later, a light tap on the doorstep echoed into the wooden chamber, and she made her move. She spun and dove at him, but a fist came sailing into her forehead, dropping her. He grabbed her by the throat and hoisted her up onto the log-splitter, the rotted wood bending under her weight. The sun's dying rays glimmered off the three-foot circular saw immediately to her left.

Logan held the shotgun to her face, her knife still bulging out of his stomach, and grinned. The trigger clicked.

And that was it. That was all that happened. No slug burst from the barrel. No detonation shattered her skull. Nothing. The shotgun lacked a shell to release.

“No such thing as chance, huh, motherfucker?” She seized the barrel, kicked him in the side, leapt up and thrust his head down on the edge of the saw. In finality, she yanked her knife out of him and wiped it clean on his shirt.

The weight of his body attached to the saw pulled it down at a forty-five degree angle, warping the wood that held it. His corpse knelt, the sharp steel disc jutting out of his forehead and a last look of sheer terror in his eyes.


	8. Days Three through Four - Sterling

She walked. She ate. She drank.

Her feet hurt. Her head hurt. Her back hurt.

The portable yet filling food in the ration pack she had relocated to her own backpack to minimize carrying weight. The empty shotgun she’d fashioned a strap for. The radio she’d used, but upon “Alex” picking up, she’d switched it off. She didn’t want to have to explain that she alone was coming to rescue them all. They’d think she killed Nathaniel.

Besides, it was only for making sure they were still alive. She would bring back as many people as there were, and if they were dead, she would bring back the other fucking radio to prove it.

 

As she passed sparse broken buildings choked to death with vines, bits of bright colors appeared amongst crumbling houses. She hurried up to them, and spilling out of the garages of at least half the houses were piles of weather-eaten yet colorful rubble.

Buried in the mounds were chunks of old decorations, dirt-encrusted toys, shreds of torn clothes, planks and pieces of furniture. Similar remnants were found at each household. Evidently the infection had interrupted a garage sale, weather having taken its toll on the secondhand merchandise.

She surveyed the area as much as she could, checking in and outside of houses for anything useful. She uncovered a few shotgun shells, but other weapons and munitions were absent from where they might have once been. Most likely the residents had taken what they could and left.

On the dining room table of one of the houses, two self-shot polaroids of a girl and a goodbye note collected dust. She was waving in one picture; holding her heart in the other.

Also among the loot were some preserved foods, odds and ends perfect for impromptu weapons, books and comics for the journey ahead, and a button with a brown moustache on it, which she promptly pinned to her backpack.

It was fun for her to again see all the old posters and decorations of teenagers’ rooms that she would’ve had had she lived in the world before.

That reminded her: the Dawn of the Wolf, Part 1 movie was still in her backpack. She started reaching for it, but stopped when she realized that without electricity, there was no way she could watch it. It was unlikely that a working generator of any sort would be just lying around in a basement somewhere.

Wandering into the master bedroom of one house, she felt her eyes come to rest on the queen-size bed. The golden blankets were pristinely made, and the only thing out of place was the layer of dust coating it all.

She flung the top blanket and pillowcase away, sending a flurry of particles airborne. Then she let herself collapse into the embrace of the immense cushion. It was the biggest bed she’d ever lain in.

         

When she woke, several hours had passed. Judging by how the light had changed in the bedroom, she realized that afternoon had fallen.

Slipping her backpack on, she bounded down the stairs like a child coming down for breakfast. Instead of breakfast, she wolfed down half a sandwich from among the rations.

As she continued through the neighborhood, an iron fortress came into view. Repurposed military dividers rose some fifteen feet up, stretching across a large portion of the city. Shells of vehicles and other debris lay against parts of the walls, creating ramps.

She clambered up once such crude incline, and peered over to find the smoldering ruins of a survivor settlement. By all appearances, a group of survivors had come in, modified the checkpoint dividers, set them up around a section of houses, and taken residence. However, it seemed things had turned rather sour. All the homes, save one, had been incinerated.

The lone standing house, set apart from the rest alongside the barrier at the far side, hardly looked better off than its neighbors. Clouds of spores emptied from the windows, and fungal growths were entwined in its structure. In fact, they seemed to be the sole thing keeping it from buckling under its own weight.

She was about to retrace her steps and forge a path around, being that there was little to salvage in such a desecrated colony, but the aged and maladjusted rampart gave way under her foot. She slipped down and landed with a cry on a fractured slab of concrete that once could have been called a sidewalk.

Standing and cursing the wall, she ambled down the road between rows of blackened stakes and pyramidal piles of ash pointing vaguely up like the teeth of a fire-breathing monster. In the midst of a select few outlines, pieces of charred skeleton reached in vain with evanescent hands toward some unseen salvation.

A few tears of sympathy forced their way out of her eyes at their morbid and likely undeserved passing. A notion sparked in her that she could spare the time for proper mourning, but she reluctantly pressed toward the standing house, the only apparent exit to the remains of the inferno.

At the front of the unstable house, she already heard the clicking that set any survivor’s heart on edge. The door refused to budge, but a strong kick to the rusted lock was enough to snap both it and the vegetation crawling upon the inside.

She brandished her bow and arrow and set to work scoping out an exit. Along the slope that was once a carpeted stairwell lay an infected deceased from mere longevity, now sprouting dreary neon fungi. Planting soft footsteps around the stairs toward what appeared to have been the kitchen, she isolated the noises of infected to one on the main floor and two below her. The treated wood underfoot creaked upon the placement of a foot on it, then gave way, sending her crashing down onto an unfinished basement floor of poured cement.

The clicking picked up, and after affirming her location to be a cramped bathroom, she identified the form of a clicker approaching her. She nocked her arrow, drew, and released, the tip burying itself in the imperfections of the clicker’s face with a satisfying _thunk_. Crawling out of the bathroom into the mazelike basement, she braced for the second creature to emerge.

Movement behind her caught her ears and she spun, an arrow fully drawn before she even knew what she saw.

But it wasn’t an infected. 

         

 

          


	9. Day Four - Highway 6

It was a girl. She sat curled up against a wall surfaced in fungus, spores peppering her clothes. By all accounts, she should’ve turned long before Ellie arrived.

She held her head back, eyeing Ellie’s arrow with contempt. “Wow,” She muttered sarcastically. “I don’t even have the privilege of dying from old age.”

Ellie shushed her, scanning what she could see of the basement. Snapping off a chunk of shelf fungi over the girl’s head, she lobbed it over to the far side of the room. The pitch and speed of the clicking shot up, and the creature tumbled over a decaying couch to where the chunk landed. Ellie steadied herself, took aim, and let it fly.

The clicker sprung to full height and the arrow stuck into its chest. It shrieked, and she sprinted up, flicking out her knife. She dug the blade into its throat and yanked it through half its neck, blood shooting out in a fine spray. The clicker dropped to the floor.

“Fine work there, Legolas,” the girl scoffed.

Ellie retrieved her arrow, then hurried back up to her and whispered, “How the hell are you not infected?”

She gave Ellie a clueless look and shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”

“Let’s get out of here, come on.” Ellie helped her up, seeing as she was unarmed, and led her to the stairs. Taking each step slowly and silently, they reached the main floor without alerting the last clicker. At the top of the stairs, they stood in the hallway between the entryway and kitchen.

Clicking echoed from the kitchen area, and Ellie readied an arrow. She stepped around the corner into the kitchen, and the clicker twisted around and immediately charged her.

“Shit shit shit!” Ellie swore, releasing the arrow. It sailed over its shoulder, and the creature tackled her, its mouth chomping dangerously close to her face. She held her forearm on its neck, keeping it as far away from her as possible.

A thin wooden beam pierced its head, a spattering of blood landing on her face, and the pressure lifted. The girl tore the body off of Ellie, extracting the improvised spear and repeatedly pulverizing its head until it was nothing but a bubbling pulp.

Ellie scrambled to her feet, staring wide-eyed at the granulated tissue of the creature. The girl, dripping in blood and breathing heavily, turned to her. “Sorry,” she said. “Living somewhere cramped for so long, you know; kinda makes you mad.”

Ellie nodded, raising her eyebrows. “Yeah. I know the feeling.”

They broke open the sliding glass door at the back of the house, and came out into a sort of outdoor vestibule surrounded in more repurposed metal walls. Now in proper light, they took a better look at each other.

The girl took off her sweatshirt and wiped her face with the cleaner inside, then tossed it aside. Long, wavy blonde hair flowed down past her shoulders like seaweed. She had slim eyes, and a streak of freckles ran across her nose from cheekbone to cheekbone. She looked to be in her late teens. A smattering of old scratches and bruises graced her face and arms. “So what’s your name?” She asked.

“Ellie.” She wasn’t sure why she didn’t hesitate. With nearly everyone else she’d met wandering, she’d withheld her identity.

“I’m Chloe.” She held out her hand, but upon seeing how dirty it was, wiped it on her jeans. She held it back up, but then said, “Well, shit, that didn’t make it any better.”

Ellie held back a smile. “So… You don’t know how you survived in there without turning?”

She shrugged. “Well obviously it doesn’t affect me, because I was living in there for the better part of a month.”

“A _month_? What did you eat?”

“I had some food, but you pretty much came just in time. How about you, though? You immune too?”

Ellie nodded, pulling up her right sleeve and left pant leg to reveal her bites. The small patches of yellowy bubbles and reddish clots had hardly changed over the years. “This one when I was thirteen,” she said, indicating her arm. “And this one when I was seventeen.” She pointed to her leg. “You have any bites?”

Chloe shook her head. “Nah, I just snort spores all day.”

“Huh. It’s weird not being the only immune person anymore.”

They glanced around at the walls trapping them. A generator was wired up to a makeshift door lock system, though neither appeared to be in working order. Ellie popped open the gas tank and inhaled. “Dry as a bone.”

Chloe picked up the extension cord, unplugging one end. “I know. I’ll hold onto one end of the cord, you give me a boost over, I’ll tie it to something, and you can climb over.”

“How do I know you won’t just bolt?”

She half frowned, half smiled. “Okay, _you_ go first then, if you’re that paranoid.”

Ellie rolled her eyes, and Chloe laced her fingers together for a foothold. Ellie stepped up, the cord held between her teeth, and grasped the edge of the wall. She pulled herself over, shoes slapping on the street, and wrapped the cord tight around a nearby tree. “You’re good!” She called.

Within seconds Chloe hopped over the wall as well.

“So,” she asked as they fell in step beside each other. “What brings a lonesome wanderer to the sprawling city of New Sterling?”

“A rescue mission, of sorts,” Ellie said.

Her eyebrows lifted. “Ooh, well, I’m honored.”

“Well… Not exactly for you.”

“No? Which luck-befallen damsel in distress awaits thy arrival?”

She wasn’t sure how much she wanted to tell her, but she also wasn’t sure what it could hurt. “A handful of survivors trapped up in Minnesota. They got split off from their group, and the other half asked me and a couple others to bring them back.”

Chloe’s smile faded. “I know what that’s like.”

“Bringing people back?”

“Splitting up. Being left behind. That sort of thing.”

They didn’t say anything for a minute, keeping their eyes on the road ahead. “You know, Chloe, I… I think we have a lot in common.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

           

         

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really not doing very well at keeping these Friday updates on Fridays. My apologies.


	10. Day Five - Highway 138

“You look like a Zoey.”

“What?” Ellie giggled.

“You look like your name could be Zoey.”

“Yeah?” She smiled, gazing into Chloe’s eyes. “Well, _you_ look like a… Veronica. Or maybe Maisie.”

She nodded, considering. “I can do Veronica. Heh, that sounds like some sort of space duo: Zoey and Veronica. ‘From the creators of _Savage Starlight:_ In the year 2186, interstellar bounty hunters Zoey and Veronica cross paths on a mission for the same target. Tension arises when one wants him dead, and the other alive.’”

“That would be so fucking cool,” Ellie dreamed. “Hey, that reminds me.” She flung off her backpack and dug around inside, producing her collection of _Savage Starlight_ comic books. “I forgot I still had these.” She handed the stack to Chloe, whose eyes lit up.

“No fucking way…” She flipped through the stack.

“Took me about a year of crossing the whole country to collect them.”

“Well shit, let’s park our asses down right here, have lunch, or supper, whatever time it is, and read through these again! It’s been _eons_ since I’ve even seen one.”

Ellie smiled. “Why the hell not.”

 

Hours later, stomachs, minds, and hearts full, Ellie and Chloe, Zoey and Veronica, wanderers in a science fiction universe, made camp on the side of the road under the awning of a rotted building.

“Hey Ellie?”

“Yeah?” She was leaning against the building, sharpening arrows, and looked up when Chloe spoke.

“I mean I know the answer to this is pretty obvious, but can I ask what happened to your rescue team?”

Ellie put away the sharpener and slid the arrow into her quiver. “Me and two other guys were scouting around our village, when we were ambushed by this asshole and half of his group. His name was Nathaniel, and he forced us and three of his guys to go and rescue the rest of his group up in Minnesota. He said if we came back without the rest of his group, he’d kill us and our entire village. And even if the rest of his group were all dead, we’d have to bring back proof.

“But it didn’t take long before his guys tried to rape me. So I ended up killing them. But infected heard the gunshots. One of the guys with me got separated, and the other was crushed by infected.”

Chloe cast an empathetic gaze to her. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why do people say that? Why do people apologize for things that aren’t their fault?” Ellie asked, trying not to sound angry.

“Because I’m pretty damn sure I know what you’ve been through.”

Ellie looked up at her.

“You know when I mentioned I knew what it was like to see groups split up?”

Ellie nodded.

“Well, let me tell you the whole story. About a month ago, a couple of the adults in my village started arguing about whether we should move to a new village or not, and before long, everyone was taking sides. Half of them said they were heading to Mount Rushmore and the other half said good fucking riddance. Nobody seemed to notice the fact that I hadn’t chosen a side. My parents went with the half headed to Mount Rushmore, and I ended up staying.

“Almost as soon as they left, a metric shit ton of explosives and gunfire started raining down upon our village. And there was fuck-all we could shoot back at, because of the walls. I took cover in the basement of that entryway house, and stayed there until the rumbling and shouting stopped. When I came back up, everything within the walls, except the house I hid in, was burned to the ground. I was the only one left. And I was scared to go outside the walls, because I didn’t know if they were still out there. So I just…” Her voice quivered, and Ellie saw her eyes well up. “I just sat down in the fucking basement of that fucking house, and I just cried.” She sniffed, hugging her knees. “Because it was all I could fucking do.”

Ellie put her hand on Chloe’s arm in sympathy.

“Nobody cared about me, and that’s the only reason I’m alive. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Hey,” Ellie started. She didn’t know what more to say. “It’s alright. I’m here.”

“Ellie, can we go to Mount Rushmore? It’s not too far out of your way, and I don’t even care if my family isn’t there. I just want to be there.”

“Of course.”

Chloe rested her head on Ellie’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

           

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I can't seem to keep a consistent update schedule, I'm just gonna make it a weekend update every weekend.
> 
> Also, Happy Halloween!


	11. Day Eight - Alliance

Over the years, windstorms had blown cascades of dust across the mid-Nebraska city, giving it the impression of a ghost town. Half the structures lay crumbling after so much exposure.

The rotted door of a building burst open and off its hinges, slamming onto the dust-covered street, and Chloe stepped out, decked in boots, chaps, and a cowboy hat. Revolvers hung in holsters at either hip. She marched over the door and took a position on the sandy road.

About a hundred feet down, Ellie mirrored her, in matching attire.

“This town ain’t big enough fer the two of us,” Chloe spat in an intentionally terrible western accent.

“More like this _country_ ain’t big enough fer the two of us,” Ellie returned.

“I don’t care who ain’t big enough for what. But today, pardner, you’ll be singin’ with the angels.”

Ellie shook her head. “Nah, it’ll be _you_ who’ll be dancin’ with the _devils_!”

“Let’s get it over with, then!” She spread her legs and held her arms out, fingers twitching over the revolvers.

Ellie did the same, holding perfectly still, eyes squinted against the sunlight.

Their eyes met, and as if on cue, a breeze pushed some dust across the ground between them.

Chloe drew her guns and fired. As soon as she did, Ellie drew and dove behind a rusted car. She then popped up and fired back at Chloe, who ducked into another store.

Keeping her head low and her ears perked, Ellie stole to the other side of the road. She yanked out a loose brick from the adjacent building, and tossed it on the other side of the door her adversary had entered. Chloe rushed out, firing in the direction of the sound.

“Surprise!” Ellie shouted, firing at Chloe’s back.

“Oh, goddammit,” Chloe laughed, turning. “Nice diversion, though.” She holstered her cap guns and gave Ellie a high-five.

“They don’t call me the brick fucking master for nothing,” Ellie said.

“Heh. Shit, I’m thirsty,” she sighed.  “Let’s head to that saloon and grab a drink.” They fell into step towards it. “So, find anything good around here?”

Ellie tossed her guns through a window as they passed. “Yeah, I finally found some ammo for my pistol. And there were a few odds and ends around, too.”

“Odds and ends? The hell do you use those for? Tormenting infected?”

Ellie smiled. “No, you can make stuff. Like, a bottle of alcohol and a rag can make a half-assed Molotov cocktail. Or, a couple blades or nails, a tin can, and an explosive can make a nail bomb.”

She raised her eyebrows and nodded. “Damn. That’s pretty cool.”

“Well, when you travel across the country with one other person and a measly handful of supplies, you pick up a few things.”

Chloe smirked. “Literally.” She pulled open the doors of the saloon and Ellie followed her inside. As with most buildings, the entire interior was layered in dirt and dust. Unlike most, however, the state of the furniture and decorations was seemingly untouched. “Oh, hell yeah.”

They took a seat at the bar, admiring their surroundings. “All in favor of spending the night here?” Ellie asked, slinging off her backpack.

“Oh, I thought that was a given.”

“I’ll grab us some refreshments. Sit tight.” Ellie hopped off her stool and stepped behind the counter, taking in the polychromatic display of alcohol muted by a shield of chalky glass.

“Is that Bronlivet 12?” Chloe asked, pointing up at a bottle on a high shelf.

“Bron-what?”

“Bronlivet 12. Though it’s probably more like Bronlivet 39 by now.”

Ellie swung open the case, breaking the aged lock, and reached up for the tall yellow-tinted bottle. She set it on the counter and produced a couple glasses, then returned to her stool.

“Can’t believe you’ve never had this shit,” Chloe said, peeling off the wrapper and giving the cap a sturdy twist.

Ellie shrugged. “Yeah, well. I was never really a drinker.”

Chloe tilted the bottle over Ellie’s glass, then over her own, the liquid pouring thinly. “Well I’ll be damned if this isn’t the best motherfucking single malt scotch you ever done drank. To endurance,” she said, raising her glass.

“And survival.” They clinked and drank. Ellie’s eyebrows shot up as she swallowed. “Holy shit. I remember a time when I’d have spat out my stomach at something like that, but damn, that was good.”

“That’s what I’m tellin’ you.” She tipped back the rest of her glass and poured herself more.

“How do you know so much about… well, drinking?”

“My family. Heh, what merry drunkards we were.” She stared across the bar, her eyes weighted with memory. “I mean, it was all we had, really. To keep ourselves occupied.” Her shoulders twitched, and she leaned down on the bar and took another long sip. “Ellie, do you ever get lonely?”

“Pff, me? Never.”

“No, I mean…” She exhaled and shook her head. “Nevermind.”

“What?”

She met Ellie’s gaze. “Do… Do y—” Her eyes fell away. “No. Nevermind.”

“What is it?” Ellie pressed, giggling.

“Nothing!” Chloe smiled. “No, we’re done talking about it.”

“Come on, you can trust me!” Ellie said, giving her a teasing shove.

“Honey, no, you need more to drink.” She refilled Ellie’s glass before she could protest.

Still laughing, Ellie brought the glass back up to her lips. “Well, you’re right in saying this is the best single malt scotch I’ve ever had. But it’s also probably the only single malt scotch I’ve ever had.”

“Y’know, this place ain’t so bad. Whaddya say we just give up and set up camp here forever?”

“I don’t know if I really like the idea of giving up.”

“In all honesty, I don’t know if there’s much hope for either of our causes.”

Ellie shook her head. “You keep finding something to fight for. That’s what Joel told me.”

“And what are you fighting for?”

Her shoulders lifted, then fell. “Well… I’m… still trying to figure that out.”

A long silence passed.

Chloe stared at her empty glass, contemplating refilling it. “You know, maybe _we’re_ the infection.”

“ _Us_? Humans?”

“I’m serious. Think about it. Because of an outbreak, humanity gets practically wiped out, and what’s left turns on itself, and suddenly only a fraction of the population is still alive. And look what happened. Nature retook its turf. The air is cleaner. Animals are free. The planet is flourishing, because humans aren’t there to control it.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Except then we might as well just kill ourselves and let nature take its course. I don’t know. It’s a stupid theory.”

“It’s not stupid. It’s just… kind of a poetic way to look at it.”

She shrugged. “Oh hey, wait a minute, here’s a brighter theory: we’re both immune, right? So… if it’s common enough for two random immune people to run into each other _once_ …” She trailed off, looking to Ellie.

“…Then maybe there are other people like us out there?”

“Yes! And maybe, maybe the immunity is—is, uh, shit, what’s the word? Passed down through family—her, hereh… _Hereditary_ , that’s it. Maybe it’s hereditary. So if we… you know, find someone who, you know… we can… well.”

“Fuck him?”

“…Yeah.”

“I’m sure _he’d_ be happy about that.”

Chloe blushed. “And we wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know. It depends. What if the only one we can find is some older or ugly guy?”

“I mean, it _is_ the apocalypse. You can’t be too picky.”

“Well.” Ellie smiled. “As long as _one_ of us is open to it.”

“Oh, that’s how it’s gonna be? Well maybe I oughtta make you join in!”

“Oh, please,” Ellie teased. “With _you_? Chloe, you’re officially drunk.”

“I know, it’s great. Care to join me?”  


	12. Day Twelve - Mount Rushmore

Fiery leaves danced on the ends of swaying branches. The wind quenched their flame, knocking them from the trees, so they twirled down like ashes, painting the breeze with shades of red, orange, and yellow, until they touched down onto the pavement.

In the four windy days it had taken Ellie and Chloe to near Mount Rushmore, the roads they followed became progressively flooded with leaves, and the trees guiding the roads became progressively skeletal.

As they traveled, the crackling sound gradually shifted from the limbs of foliage, to the mini-whirlwinds above the ground, to beneath the girls’ feet.

“…I think I would have to say flying,” Ellie said. “Being able to soar around with the birds, looking over the world. That would be so cool. Just imagine looking down from way up there, at a city, or a mountain range, or even a farm. All green and overgrown. What about you?”

“Shooting fire out of my hands. I don’t know, something badass like that.” Chloe unwrapped a sucker and popped it in her mouth. “Or super speed. That’d be sweet. I could search that car up there and be back before you could say, ‘Speedy Gonzales!’”

“Holy shit, a car? I don’t think we’ve seen a car since we left Alliance.”

The car, a dirty and slightly dented but otherwise unblemished red Dodge Challenger, complete with dual black stripes, lay motionless on the shoulder. Under the cover of deceased foliage, skid marks trailed away from the tires, the right two of which had come to rest on the grass lining the street.

The two approached, peering in the dark windows. Ellie stepped around the driver’s side, and nearly jumped upon seeing the skeleton in the driver’s seat. The wooden handle of a hunting knife jutted out from the chest, the unseen blade pinning it against the seat. Judging from the apparel, Ellie guessed the body was a girl.

“Oh my god,” Chloe said when she saw, pulling her sucker out. She opened the passenger door and found a thin sheet of paper on the floor. “Hey, check this out.” She climbed in, planting herself in the passenger seat to read the page.

“What’s it say?” Ellie asked, examining the driver’s clothes, which, bloodstains aside, were in far better condition than their wearer.

“It’s a suicide note. ‘I don’t know who will find this first, but whoever does, I want them to know that I’m sorry, and I wish I didn’t have to do this. I just don’t have the patience or the hope or any of that to keep going. All the groups I’ve been with since the first camp have either been attacked by infected, broken up by arguments, or lost. I’m done putting up with this world. Goodbye.’” Chloe paused, looking over the paragraph again. “You have to wonder why she…” She trailed off, shaking her head.

“She said why in the note.”

“No, I mean… What would cause a person to want to do that?”

“It’s not always a want. Sometimes it’s a need. Trust me, I’ve been there.”

“Well, so have I, but…”

“But you didn’t.”

“You didn’t either, obviously. What made you keep going?”

“Hope,” Ellie said. She took the paper and read over it herself. “It’s so sad.”

Chloe began sifting through the glove box. “What’s that?”

“That people lose hope. Hope is what drives us, isn’t it?”

“Well.” She flipped through the pages of a manual. “I would imagine some people have slightly more practical aims.”

“That’s what I mean. Hope can mean different things for different people.”

“And what does it mean to you?” She met Ellie’s eyes.

“We had this conversation already. Finding something to fight for.”

“But you don’t know what you’re fighting for. I remember. But what about your village? Ellie. Babe. You’re walking halfway across the country for them. How is that not fighting for them?”

Ellie took hold of the knife handle and extracted it from the seat and skeleton, then slammed the door shut. Chloe stepped out of the passenger side and folded her arms over the roof of the car, waiting for a reply.

“Babe, if you’re not gonna answer, will you at least pop the trunk?”

Ellie looked to see her staring back with kitten eyes. She exhaled, opened the door again, and pressed the trunk button.

 

A myriad of vandalism distorted the ordinarily inexpressive faces of the quartet of lapidarian presidents into discouraged scowls. Little remained of Washington; a crater was carved into his forehead with cracks spiderwebbing their way outward. Elongated, multicolored banners displaying vulgar phrases fluttered over Jefferson, whose eyes were each replaced with poles on which hung black flags with a red anarchistic A on either side. Roosevelt’s entire profile was deformed with cement. A thick layer of unidentifiable black coating spilled down Lincoln’s features.

         

“I shouldn’t have expected anything more.”

Chloe leaned over the stone wall, her gaze fixed not on the national memorial but, to Ellie’s best guess, the air in front of her. Ellie stood a few feet back, shivering from the breeze. Behind them were remnants of various camps that had come and gone. There was no evidence of Chloe’s family or group specifically.

“Fuck. I need a drink.” Chloe stepped over to Ellie, snatching the bottle of scotch out of her backpack. They’d taken an extra bottle for the road from the saloon, and she now swallowed the last drops before returning to her position overlooking the ground under the memorial. “There could be a million goddamn reasons they’re not here, and I’ll never fucking know which one it is.”

 “I’m sorry,” Ellie breathed softly, setting a hand on Chloe’s shoulder.

Chloe shrugged it off harshly. “No, fuck off, Ellie. They’re not here. Nothing you say is gonna change that.”

“Chloe, I’m just trying to be sympathetic. _Empathetic_. I know what it’s like. But _I’m_ here.”

“Not for long. You’ve got responsibilities. To your village.”

“I… What? Aren’t you coming with me?”

“Can’t.”

Ellie frowned. “Why the hell not?”

“I have to find my godforsaken family.” She lobbed the empty bottle into the carpet of pine trees.

“Chloe, for all we know, they could be dead. And if not, they might be long gone—”

“‘Empathetic’,” Chloe mocked, throwing up finger quotes without turning.

Ellie stopped. Looked down. “I’m sorry. But listen to me. They’re gone. I’m not. It’s safer to be together.”

She spun around. “Ellie. I want to come with you. I really do. But I owe it to my family to find them and be with them. There’s no other option for me.”

“I don’t mean to sound negative, but listen to what you’re saying. You want to split up so you can spend the rest of your life searching for people who are most likely dead? Think through this, Chloe. What are the chances of you finding them? They could be thousands of miles in any direction. You have no leads, no evidence they were even _here_ , and you want to stick around and search the whole fucking state?”

She turned back around.

Long seconds passed. “I’m sorry,” Ellie said, joining her against the wall.

“It’s okay.”

She found her eyes drifting up to Chloe’s face. Chloe must’ve felt Ellie’s gaze on her, because she turned her head and they locked eyes.

A grin tugged at the corners of Chloe’s mouth for a second before releasing into a full-on smile. “What, are we gonna kiss now?”

Ellie’s cheeks flared, and she couldn’t help but look away. “I don’t know.”

She watched a banner blow loose from its anchor on Jefferson.

Words nearly began to escape Ellie’s mouth, but Chloe seized her shoulders and pressed her lips into Ellie’s. Ellie almost protested, but immediately changed her mind when a warm tingle shot through her. The chill of fall was forgotten as their contact held. Chloe’s hands graced Ellie’s neck, clasping around it, and she pressed against her lips harder. Kissed her again. And again. And Ellie couldn’t help but fall into the rhythm.

Chloe took hold of Ellie’s lower lip with her teeth and tugged, watching her reaction. She released her bite, and Ellie slowly opened her eyes to see Chloe’s blushing smirk.

“You could stay.”

Ellie felt her eyes begin to well up. “I… Chloe I’m sorry.”

Chloe’s eyes glistened. Her hands dropped to her sides, swung a bit, then wrapped around Ellie in a long, tight embrace.

“Wait.” Ellie pulled out of her grasp and opened her backpack. She produced the radio Nathaniel had given her and handed it to Chloe. “This is the radio they used to check on their group. They gave it to us so we could make sure they were still alive. If you take this one, I can call you from the other one once I get there.”

“And just hope they stay alive?”

“I don’t give a fuck whether they’re dead or alive. I just have to bring back proof. I haven’t been using this thing anyway.”

Chloe held it as though it were as fragile as a newborn.

“I saw some food in the tent over by the stairs. And here.” Ellie handed her the shotgun and dug in her pack for the extra ammunition. “Just in case.”

She slung the shotgun over her shoulder and stuck the radio in her back pocket. “Thanks. And Ellie…” She hesitated. “Good luck.”

“Yeah. You too.”


	13. Day Twenty - Pierre

The wood arced. The bowstring tightened. The shaft glided back perpendicular to the handle. The broadhead glared with a downward tilt.

The string snapped taut, and the arrow sailed over the street and plunged directly into the skull of its unsuspecting victim. The man collapsed against the building behind him.

“Fuck yeah,” Ellie whispered, nocking a second arrow.

From her vantage point on the roof of the hotel, she took note of the positions of two others loitering around the gas station across the street. Once they had wandered a reasonable distance from one another, she disposed of them.

People meant a group. A group meant food. Food meant restocking for the rest of the trip.

Ellie dropped through the breach in the shingles into the weather-eaten room she’d come through. She bounded out the room and down the stairs, halting her step upon exiting on ground level. She kept an arrow nocked and her eyes scanning as she dislodged her fired munitions from their targets. None of the three had more than a few bullets each on their persons.

In the absence of threats, she took a moment to reflect on the depressing state of the gas station. A haphazard accumulation of expended vehicles lay like a pile of burnt corpses under the warped canopy, rust coating them like charred skin. Text half-heartedly spray-painted onto a few pumps read simply, “empty”. Weeds crawled greedily out from the fissures in the pavement. A disfigured line of corroded metal shelves extended from the wall of the storefront into the street, suggesting a makeshift residence in the building.

She stole up to the front, where the extracted shelves covered her flank. Taking hold of a detached plate of metal, she lobbed it amongst the rust-mongering skeletons. A grating series of metallic _clangs_ resounded, and curses from inside the building followed.

Peering around the corner, she watched four figures of varying dress and size emerge, two with pistols and two with lead pipes. Before any of them could so much as speak, she slung a nail bomb at their feet and dove behind the cover of the corner.

The detonation mixed with the splatter of shredded flesh, the harsh crack of bone, and brief outcries of pain.

Ellie stepped around the corner to find four ex-survivors within a radius of thick crimson. The proximity of the explosion in relation to the targets made futile any attempt to ascribe which fingers, hands, feet, arms, legs, heads, or amorphous fragments of tissue had belonged to whom.

Circumventing the barricade of shelves, she found a second door, which she cautiously entered. She scanned the room over the shaft of her drawn arrow, and upon discerning its vacancy, let down her aim. In lieu of the shelves, six sleeping bags were spread across the floor. She combed the interior, confiscating every compact and lasting food item that entered her line of sight. Yet to her confusion, no seventh resting place for the seventh body turned up.

Voices caught her ears from outside. Her body twisted and drew her arrow back without so much as a thought.

“Holy mother of fuck,” a queasy voice spoke. “Oh, god… Oh, Christ…” Someone threw up. “Who the fuck did this?” “I told them gas stations were bad luck to make camp at.”

The sounds aggregated near the front of the store. Ellie backed through the door connecting to the carwash, holding her aim steady in case someone entered. Once through the door, she closed it and surveyed her surroundings. Derelict mechanisms hung ominously from the walls and ceiling like aged torture instruments.

She hadn’t intended to kill this many people just for food. A few, sure; they hardly looked ready to bargain anyway. But she wouldn’t slaughter a whole camp if she didn’t have to. She put away the second nail bomb she realized she was holding in favor of a smoke bomb.

Both of the carwash doors were open. She edged toward the one on the side of the gas pumps, where the voices were, and focused her hearing.

“Alright, everyone spread out. We’re gonna find the son of a bitch who did this.”

More threats echoed, and Ellie counted three different voices, but a few sets of footsteps that didn’t correspond with the positions of the voices. A single set approached the carwash door, and as she entered, Ellie dropped the smoke bomb, sprung up with her knife and slit the woman’s throat. 

Ellie pocketed the woman’s ammunition and retrieved her smoke bomb. She began to head out the opposite carwash door, but as she did, the door leading into the store burst open and a man stood, assault rifle raised, in the doorway.

“Just where do you think y—” He couldn’t finish; Ellie flung her smoke bomb and it went off, clouding his immediate vicinity with a bank of impenetrable fog. She sprinted out the opening.

She doubted she had enough food to last for longer than a few days, but she doubted she’d have any more luck here.

She hooked a right, aiming toward the river. Her step zigzagged as she felt the sights of a weapon lining up with her. A shot rang and the air alongside her ear shuddered. A second shot slammed into her right ankle, and she toppled with a cry. She pushed herself on all fours, despite the pain, but didn’t cover much ground before a rifle barrel tapped her skull.

She glanced around without moving her head. Middle of the street. Nothing to hide behind.

The barrel tapped her backpack and bow. She hesitatingly slid them off her shoulders and rolled around. A man in thick, dirt-encrusted clothing hovered over her, unmoving. A red bandana masked his face like a bandit, and his ropy dark hair trailed over his eyes.

He fired a single shot into the air. Several other survivors emerged from around the building, some with weapons raised.

Someone in the growing crowd shouted, “You the bitch who killed our guys back there?”

“I’m just passing through.”

“Bullshit,” someone else said. “Where’s the rest of your group?” “The hell you even doing here?” Similar shouts and mockeries were thrown out as the man dressed like a bandit snatched up her bow and backpack from the ground and dug through the latter.

“I say we toss her in the cage! We ain’t had a good cage match in a while,” one suggested.

The majority of the congregation voiced approval, and Bandit lowered his gun, slung her backpack and bow over his own shoulder, and gripped Ellie’s arm with a hand like steel. He wrenched her to her feet—or rather, foot—and yanked her along.

 

One of them raised the gate of the shed behind the gas pumps, where inside was an immense cage dog kennel meant for outdoors, leaving little room between the garage walls and the cage. The excitement among the survivors had increased exponentially on the walk back to the gas station. Bets were already being placed, either on “the Bitch” or “the Devil”.

Ellie was relentlessly flung into the kennel, and involuntarily placed her weight onto her right foot, upon which she collapsed. She immediately tore a strip of sleeve off her sweatshirt and tied it around her throbbing ankle. The material’s red coloring immediately darkened several shades. 

“Have fun in there, bitch!” came the taunts.

A moving truck backed up to the building and stopped. The driver stepped out and lifted the tailgate, wherein several large, quivering wooden chests lay. Two men jumped in and brought out the closest box, set it upright in front of the kennel door, and unlatched it. Immediately an infected creature sprung forth, and the men locked the kennel door behind it. The space around the cage flooded with an audience, filling the building with their cheers.

Ellie struggled up, eyes wide at the creature sharing a ten-foot square with her. This was no clicker.

Fungal plates layered its slender body like scale mail, various shelves bulging outward into spikes. Its head was a puke-hued efflorescence of fungiform shingles with distorted teeth ringing the center. But its most defining feature was a serrated pink tentacle, moist with a transparent, russet sludge, suspended from the hole in its face, flicking around like a flaccid pendulum. A grating sequence of clacking noises spewed from it, and a bilious stench crawled up Ellie’s nostrils.

She felt an acidic lump rise in the confines of her throat. She swallowed it, and it burned all the way down, as if in retaliation of her choice not to free it.

Ellie unhesitatingly dubbed the creature a licker.

Preoccupied by the circumambient clamor, the licker charged the chain links enclosing it. The audience leaped back, their incessant mockery lost on it.

Without warning a deluge of reeking liquid bucketed over Ellie from behind. Before she could identify her assailant, the licker twisted toward her with the enthusiasm of a hungry child. It jolted up to her, crashing her against the chain links. The licker’s sodden tongue slinked over her torso and around her neck. Wrestling to the extent of her strength, she kept its protruding incisors at bay, though the meat tentacle constricted her neck and encroached upon her mouth. Desperate, she reared back and clamped her teeth upon the pulp.

The taste may well have been comparable to compacting as much vomit as humanly possible into one’s mouth, to the point where one’s own throat-scorching vomit joined the mix.

The tongue retreated, and Ellie sent the creature stumbling with a kick, then immediately dropped to hands and knees, shuddering violently, and released a puddle of bile from her quaking mouth. She never thought natural throw up could ever taste so good.

The irony of saving her own life by biting an infected momentarily crossed her mind, but she didn’t have time to reflect on it, as the creature again lunged toward her.

This time she was ready. The tongue lashed out, and she took hold of it and gave it a sharp yank, bringing the licker’s head into contact with her knuckles. But she didn’t relinquish hold of the tongue; she again pulled it to her, this time introducing the licker’s jaw with her heel. Shelves of fungi shattered off like peanut brittle.

Her morbid satisfaction was short-lived, as the licker stampeded her, this time hard enough for Ellie to feel the cage’s chain pattern dig into her skull. However, she was also made acutely aware of the position of her handgun still tucked into the back of her jeans. Which also reminded her of her knife.

She clenched her fingers around the handle, slid it from her pocket, popped open the blade, and swung, all in one motion. The sharpened metal cleaved through the clammy tentacle like a hot knife through butter. Foreign fluid gushed from the severance points, but Ellie dove forward, and with a final slash carved through exterior plating and sundered half of its neck. Its head hung at an unnerving slant for a moment before the beast crumpled to the ground.

The crowd broke out in frantic noise. Bet winnings were passed out, complaints raised, and taunts made toward all parties. All while the victor stood panting, weight on one foot, a severed tongue in one hand and a switchblade in the other, the body of a creature at her feet.

A booming voice cascaded over the rest. “I think it’s time for round two!”

         

         


	14. Day Twenty - Missouri River

“Bring in Iceberg and the Lady of the Evening!” one of the men ordered the others around him.

Ellie pocketed her knife and dropped the tongue, a plan rapidly establishing itself.

Four men hauled two caskets from the truck. The leader set his end down to unlock the gate. As he did, Ellie’s pistol entered her hand and she released two bullets into his sternum. He dropped, and Ellie bounded one-legged to the gate as chaos broke loose in the audience. She climbed up the slant of the box still being held on one end, but the holder relinquished his grasp in favor of a weapon. The box crumpled on impact and Ellie rolled off, freeing a clicker bearing a cascade of icicles along its mane, which proceeded to maul the other carrier of its box.

Ellie dispatched a handful of bystanders, among which were the men carrying the other box, and watched as the freed clicker dove into the masses. Shots that weren’t hers rang, and she was struck with another idea. Using the last bullets in the clip, she fired along the edge of the second box, which was promptly broken open by the clicker inside, a slender frame adorned in tattered lingerie.

Among the chaos Ellie spotted her backpack and bow residing along the edge of the shed’s gate. She snatched them and hobbled to the truck’s cab.

In the driver’s seat sat a hunter fumbling with a set of keys.

Ellie’s knife was immediately in hand and swinging. In the midst of grappling with her, the hunter managed to jam the keys in and start the ignition. He floored the gas, and Ellie gripped the steering wheel in the absence of a better handhold, which veered the truck left onto the road between the hotel and gas station. As he straightened the truck, Ellie climbed back onto him, and the door swung shut.

The hunter’s divided focus between her and the road allowed Ellie to thrust her knife into his thigh. With a cry he jerked the steering wheel left, hurling Ellie into the passenger seat. The remaining boxes in the truck audibly collided.

With her back on the seat crushing her backpack, Ellie projected her feet into his skull, and the truck swerved violently. She rolled around so her feet were under her, grasping the knife still in his thigh for support. Dazed from the kick, he struck aimlessly with his fist, catching her jaw.

Pushing off from the seat, Ellie slammed his head into the door window with one hand and a moment later opened the door with the other. His torso hung out and his hands flailed for something to hold, but they found nothing. His head swung under the chassis, and he slipped out and hit the cold hard asphalt.

The truck lurched once from the rear left wheel with a saturated crunch.

Ellie immediately shut the door and stabilized the truck. The Missouri River paralleled the road she was now headed down.

Then a gunshot exploded one of the front tires, and the truck took control. It veered over a lineup of deteriorated wooden posts and plummeted into the water. The cab flooded. Ellie seized her bow, which had become lodged between the passenger seat and corresponding door, opened the door, and paddled up until she emerged.  

The truck’s cargo had floated to the surface, and the boxes shuddered from their enraged contents. Ellie mounted one and scanned the road she’d been dumped from. Bandit stood alone, his rifle raised at her.

She tilted the box around, submerging herself, and held onto it as his bullet took residence in the creature within the wood. The beast raged, and the river’s current drew them in an undiscernible direction. But her grip and her breath held.

When the latter finally ran out, she crawled around and back atop her makeshift watercraft.

A number of boxes bobbed unsteadily along the current. No ground surrounding the river was the least bit familiar. She had escaped, but at the cost of a definite destination.

 

The wooden prison shuddered, snapping Ellie out of her concentration with patching up her foot with her other sleeve.

“What? What do you want?” Black paint above the bullet hole on the box designated its prisoner _VII: Chariot_.

Boisterous clicking echoed from inside, and the creature scratched and clawed with conviction.

“Yeah, I know you want out. But if I free you, you’ll tear me to shreds.”

Another series of clicks resounded. Ellie imitated it. The clicker quieted for a moment, then clicked again. Ellie frowned with curiosity, and imitated the new pattern.

A silence arose, as though it had grown bored. Ellie presented a fresh pattern, but there was no response other than muted movements. She rolled her eyes and resumed enhancing her bandage. “So how many people did they have _you_ kill?”

A few halfhearted clicks answered.

“That’s all?” She mocked. “Man, I’ve probably killed three times that.”

The creature jerked around and cried out.

Ellie scowled at the box. “Please for the love of god tell me you didn’t understand that. I’m not sure I’m ready to accept that after all this time there actually is someone in the heads of your kind.”

There was no response.

“That’s not very reassuring.” Finishing the re-bandaging, she sat cross-legged and drummed her fingers on the wood. “The Chariot, eh? Fleeing down a river, away from danger, with a heartless killer as my ride. That’s symbolic enough for me. And a little too familiar.”

The flowing water was the only sound.

“What’d you do, die in there? Suffocate? Drown? Hellooo?” She knocked hard.

The box quavered, and shrill outcries protested.

“ _Wellll,_ you weren’t answering. And I don’t appreciate backtalk.”

The clicking decrescendoed guiltily.

“Would you cut that out? The last thing I need is to start having sympathy for you or something.” She sighed and shook her head. “What insensitive prick named you ‘Chariot’? What kind of name is that? I can’t imagine it was ever entirely fitting until now.”

Trees rolled by. The river twisted and turned, dipped and dove.

“There’s gotta be something we can shorten it to. Let’s see—Chario, Cheerio, Chari, Ch—That’s it! Cherry. I don’t know how well it fits you exactly, but it’s easier to call you Cherry than Chariot.”

A string of indecipherable noises expressed an unintelligible opinion.

“What, don’t you like it?”

Cherry clicked.

“Well that’s too bad, because you’re a mindless being who shouldn’t give a shit anyways. Did you want to take it up with Captain Zoey of the S.S. Flaming Chariot?”

Cherry said nothing.

“I thought not.”

Cherry moaned.

“What’s that? You say I’m the one having a one-sided conversation _with_ this mindless being? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I’m clearly having an _intelligent_ conversation with the imaginary personification of an infected.”

The other boxes had been absent from sight for some time, but then a long, splintered section of wood drifted alongside them. _VII: Strength_ was painted on it.

“You see that, Cherry? Your buddy Strength broke out. I can’t possibly imagine why or how.”

Cherry’s apathy was nearly tangible.

“It’s too bad _you’re_ not strong. If you were, maybe you could break out and paddle us along this river faster.”

There were a couple probably unrelated thumps.

Ellie rolled her eyes, stared back up the river, and let out a sigh.

         

         


	15. Day Twenty-Three - Chamberlain

A distant shattering. Glass violently freed from its uniformity. Entropy spiderwebbing lightning-strike patterns through its surface. Fragments sprinkling down. Recoiling off concrete. Scattering into a variegated constellation.

 

It wasn’t the deafening splintering of the crate against the serrated ridge jutting into the river’s path.

It wasn’t the sharp impact slinging her onto jagged stone barbs.

It wasn’t the belching and shrieking of her prophetic Chariot.

It wasn’t the dizziness of occupying substantial terrain after three days of remaining afloat.

It was the lack of a customary length of pressure against her pocket that woke her.

Ellie snapped up, ignoring an inundation of neurochemical signals identifying pain, and tore apart the rock lining the road. Finding nothing but dirt and more rock, she returned to her vessel, kicked it aside, and scoured the shallows.

The clinquant sunlight did nothing to penetrate the river’s malachite opacity. Yet for a fraction of a moment, a strip of silver sparkled. Ellie plunged her hand down in, and brought up a dense handful of mud and sand, which slicked off to reveal her signature weapon.

She splashed off the residual soil, dried it on her shirt, and replaced it in her pocket. Calm eased through her at its return.

Cherry howled anxiously.

“Hi, Cherry.”

The box shuddered.

“Well, I can’t really bring you with,” Ellie breathed, hauling the box up onto the road, its underside receiving scores of marks from the rocks. She sat on the pavement, looking down the river where a bridge coupled the land. Dragging Cherry across the bridge would’ve been hard enough, let alone all the way to the mall.

Was she actually considering bringing a monster with her? What advantage could that bring? A single-use defense mechanism?

It would only get her killed. If not from the “defense mechanism” turning on its user, then undoubtedly in making enough noise to alert its relatives to their position.

“I’m sorry, Cherry. I gotta let you go.” She slid the box back down to the water. “Maybe eventually you’ll reach the ocean.”

And she sent it drifting down.

Behind her was a derelict resort. The road where she stood lay on a thin peninsula defending a modest marina. At its two docks were handfuls of diverse watercraft upon which barnacles had staked their territory.

Ellie trudged around to the front of the resort, past parking lots of deteriorating trucks and trailers, and stopped short at the sight before her.

In the front lot prevailed a cluster of automobiles emanating a prismatic radiance. The vehicles effortlessly delivered the illusion of being fresh off the assembly line. Against the encroaching wasteland, the collection was a veritable shrine, the deities smiling upon it.

An indignant, vulgarity-laden bark snagged her attention to the resort vestibule. A metallic clank resounded, followed by another cry.

An arrow was nocked and drawn before she realized it. Her feet silently guided her up behind the sign jutting out of the rotten mulch. A faded logo reading "Pine Shore" decorated each side. She tilted past the edge enough to aim down the shaft of her arrow into the lobby, where decades ago glass would have protected the interior.

The lobby area had been thoroughly renovated to permanently accommodate residents. It made sense; with all of the inventory from the guest rooms, why not embellish the largest room?

She approached the entrance and stepped into the lobby, but the voices had ceased, and no creature, living or otherwise, was in sight. The glass that had formerly encased the lobby appeared to have been freshly shattered: clean shards littered the ground of the vestibule. Sunlight gleamed through breaches in the roofing, reflecting bizarre glints off the fragments.

“I fucking _told_ you it wasn’t a goddamn infected!”

Ellie spiraled, freezing in position to release her arrow into the speaker’s throat.

Two grease-encrusted men of equal height were perched at the crest of the stairwell. One had a shaved head, a lavender contusion above his eye, a brambly patch of stubble, and wore a tattered denim vest and jeans. The other had a brown mop of hair flung to the side of his face, displaying an adornment of scars around his eye, cheek, and temple. He had black gauges and a nose ring, and wore a black v-neck and tight jeans. He appeared about five years younger.

“Well,” the older one said, “you have to admit it’s possible that one or some infected came in.”

“We cleared the whole motherfucking _state_. It’s been a long-ass time since it all started. There ain’t _shit_ around anymore.”

“Except for her, obviously.” He skipped down the stairs, ignorant of Ellie’s drawn weapon. “I s’pose it’s a good thing to see other people around these days. What brings you here?” His tone was far too casual.

“Don’t move another step,” Ellie ordered.

“Oh, if you wouldn’t mind doing us the courtesy of taking us out.”

Ellie frowned. “What?”

“I’m just saying we’d really appreciate it if you’d kill us.”

She hesitated. “Get back against the wall.”

He nodded. “Sure thing.” He obeyed, hands against the wall, palms-out.

Ellie fired her arrow into the center of his right hand, pinning him to the wall.

“ _Ow_ , fuck!” He screamed. “I thought you were aiming for my head!”

A second arrow was already nocked. “You, buddy-boy.” She aimed at the younger man. “Bring me as much food as you can carry. The longer you take, the louder he screams.” He sprinted down the hall out of sight.

“Is that all you want? Food? Because we have plenty of that.”

“Why do you want to die?”

“We’re infected. And we don’t want to turn. Or worse, see each other turn. So if you would just put one between my eyes already, I’d really appreciate it.”

“Is he coming back?”

“I—I would assume so.”

Ellie aimed at his groin. “Is he coming back?”

“Please believe me, god! Yes, I’m sure of it. I don’t have any reason to lie to you!”

“Why is he going to come back?”

“Because he’s my godforsaken brother, and I’ve been under the impression that he cares about me!”

She replaced her arrow and shouldered her bow in a single graceful swing of the arms, then dropped to sit on the ground. “Good. Then we can w—”

The younger man burst back into the room, a towering volume of canned goods toppling from his grasp into a meager pile at the top of the stairs. A can of peaches cascaded down the stairs and rolled into Ellie’s foot.

“Alright, now would you please just kill us?”

Ellie deposited the can in her backpack and stood. “You both want me to kill you?” She looked to each of them in turn.

They both nodded.

“How did you become infected? And how long ago?”

“This morning, actually. Spores from the shithole basement of this place,” the younger one said, bounding down the steps. “Cole’s dumbass decided to drag me down to check on the infected that were in the basement. Opened the door downstairs and a metric shitload of mushroom dust dumped out on us.” He pried the arrow out of the wall, but not out of his brother’s hand. “You can take care of the rest.”

The older examined his hand. “We got it sealed off, except we’ve been arguing now for hours.”

“You know, I wouldn’t mind a little pussy before eatin’ a bullet.”

“Clayton, would you curb the profanity?”

“Hey, I figure the angrier I get her, the more she’ll wanna kick my ass!”

Ellie drew her bow again. “Would you two ottsels shut the fuck up?”

They did. Cole gritted his teeth and dislodged the arrow from his palm.

“Why haven’t you killed yourselves already?” She asked.

“Because Cole’s a pussy bitchface.”

“Knock it off, would you? God. Sometimes I’m ashamed to be your brother.” He wrapped his hand in his vest. “To answer your question, well… We can’t. We can’t make ourselves. We also don’t have many good options.”

Clayton attempted to lean against the decayed railing, but it snapped at the slightest pressure. “Fuckin’ building’s falling apart,” he mumbled. “We wasted all our ammo keeping the infected in that shithole of a basement.”

“ _Spent_ it all. Not wasted.”

“Call it whatever the fuck you want. The ammo’s gone either way. We can’t take the easy way out.” He sat on the bottom step, leaning on his knees.

Cole looked to Ellie, who again lowered her weapon. “We’d appreciate, since you have a weapon with ammo, if you could put us out of our misery.”

Ellie stared at them. “Those cars out there yours?”

Cole nodded. “The one thing Clayton and I tended to agree on was a love for cars. Fixing ‘em, cleaning ‘em, all that. Our dad was a mechanic back in the day, and he taught us all he knew, for lack of a better end-of-the-world skill, I guess.”

“Do they have _gas_? Because there’s a lot you can do with a working car. Why didn’t you use that?”

Clayton scowled at Cole as though wondering the same.

Taking note of his brother’s look, Cole said, “Well, _I_ for one wanted a quick and painless death.”

“So can you kill us or not?” Clayton spat.

“If you kill us, you can have your pick of a car. Or, hell, however many you want. We’ll be dead.”

Ellie feigned consideration for a debatably believable handful of seconds. “I’ll do it.” She switched her bow with her pistol.

“Oh, thank God. Clayton, get over here and on your knees. Head next to mine so she can save bullets.”

Clayton obeyed.

Ellie switched off the safety and aligned the barrel with their skulls. “Last words?”

“Thank you, dad. For all that you taught us,” Cole said.

“Fuck this planet,” Clayton said.

She took a deep breath and put pressure on the trigger. 


	16. Day Twenty-Three - The Mall of America Part 1

Fissured asphalt jounced the suspension of the shimmering blue pickup as it tore along the roads. The entirety of the food supply at the resort rocked in the truck’s bed. The backpack and weapons rode shotgun.

 

Ellie’s index finger curled carefully against the crescent of the trigger. Its surface may well have been fine glass.

 

A crater of macadam bucked the vehicle’s front tires, then its rear, ejecting a flurry of provisions.

 

Ellie twitched her wrist upward as the trigger snapped back and the gun fired.

 

The food hailed down onto the fractured pavement, some contents of cans and boxes spilling. Tires squealed painfully.

 

The bullet drilled through the air above the brothers’ heads and planted itself within a framed photograph of a lakeside mountain above the check-in counter.

 

Ellie burst out of the truck and bitterly reclaimed the scattered items that remained intact.

 

Cole flinched and Clayton rolled his eyes. Ellie dropped to the floor on her knees. The picture swung once before clattering down.

“What the _fuck_?” Clayton chided, unmoving.

“Clayton, chill out,” Cole said. He stepped over to Ellie. “What’s wrong?”

Ellie shivered. “I can’t do it. I can’t kill you.”

Clayton uttered an icy, humorless single laugh. “Now you know how our pussy asses feel.”

Ellie snatched a shard of glass and pitched it at him. “Maybe if you were as strong as you talk, asshole!”

“Hey now!” Cole said, grabbing Clayton’s wrist before he could return the shard to its sender. “Can we just calm down and talk this out?”

“What’s there to talk about?” Clayton snapped, yanking his wrist free. “She can’t kill us any easier than we can.”

“We can _talk_ , okay, Clayton?”

He finally stood, spearing Cole’s chest with his index finger. “You know what, no. The only good _talking_ is gonna do is fuckin’ _bore_ me to death. And you know what, I’m fuckin’ starting to think maybe that ain’t such a bad fuckin’ option!”

Cole swatted away his finger and gripped his brother’s shoulders. “Would you shut up and listen to me for once in your miserable little life?”

Their outcries overlapped each other. Drowned each other out into a roaring blur. A sonorous clamor crawling its way through the hands covering Ellie’s ears.

No pride was allowed residence in Ellie’s psyche over the action her subconscious then carried out.

It wasn’t until after her hands had exhumed a cluster of blades and drove the blades haphazardly into an empty can and plucked a grenade out like an apple from a tree and trapped the grenade between the jutting blades in the can and tore out the pin of the grenade and let the pin slip from her fingers and kiss the carpet with a resonant clink that she realized what she was doing.

“ _Oh fuck!_ ” She cried, catapulting the nail bomb backward and watching through the eyes of a body suddenly running on trained instinct.

The incessant dispute of the brothers seamlessly metamorphosed into a guttural discharge decorated with metallic clanging and visceral splashing.

Ellie’s heart swallowed itself. Only her primal instinct of physical body maintenance kept her knees from sinking onto the glass sprawling from the entryway. She couldn’t turn. She couldn’t blink.

She was becoming that which she feared becoming.

 

The road east bore scant mention of humanity. Even the cities had on display a diminutive quantity of automobiles.

The drive, however, was liberating. The glorious speed at which the pickup carried her only prompted her to push harder on the gas pedal. She rolled the windows down, careless of the tainted atmosphere and dark skies overhead.

Each city she passed had found its end buried under tatterdemalion fungi and clouds of spores. Any infected that may have once circuited the premises had long since grown into the structures around them.

The nearer she came to Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the more car skeletons built up in the southbound lanes. In all likelihood, any large roads leading out of any large city would bear resemblance.

Roughly six hours after departure from the resort, Ellie found herself within the confines of the Twin Cities. Or rather, just south of them. The map she’d confiscated from the resort led her the rest of the way through the mazelike streets to the mall.  

The east parking ramp of the mall had imploded, so Ellie pushed blackened car frames out of the entrance to the west ramp with the truck.

Parking without consideration for the concept of parking spaces, or perhaps with childlike rebelliousness at their obsolescence, Ellie crowded her backpack with food and meandered down the skyway. A thin breeze pierced through the zigzag border of fractured windows.

The skyway dumped her into the rotting remains of a department store. From the corners spewed puffs of tan dust, though there was little evidence of infected. She skipped down an escalator, bow drawn, and proceeded into the mall proper. She followed the curved path presumably running along the north side of the mall, scanning the ruins of once-vibrant clothing outlets.

Glitzy pink stripes caught her eye on her right, even through years of dust, and she gleefully took in a lingerie store. She almost lowered her guard for a moment as she hurried in. But her excitement quickly turned to disgust upon realizing the store’s conversion into a veritable brothel. Pornographic magazines and images lay amongst stained blankets and pillows. What few undergarments remained were beyond salvage.

Ellie fled from the store.

She stopped at the intersection of the paths. On the right, the entrance to the central area was blockaded with an impenetrable wall of metal and plastic debris laced with possibly living vegetation. Whether it was barricaded or collapsed, she couldn’t tell. Either way, it seemed clear that this was where the rest of Nathaniel’s group lay trapped.

Continuing straight down the path, she kept alert for movement. Her feet kicked up dormant dust from the cold ground. But the west entrance to the center matched the north.

She’d taken one step down the path when an inarticulate noise drifted out from high up in the wreckage. Ellie focused her eyes and caught what appeared to be a narrow portal some fifteen feet up.

She wasted no time in scaling the compact rubble. Handholds were few and far between, and every other one gave way under her grip, but within minutes she had reached the opening. She slipped her backpack through, and, still holding it, squirmed through after it.

Before her stretched an amusement park summoned from the nightmares of the devil himself.

Dismembered rollercoaster tracks terminated at serrated blades. What little water existed in the log chute was tainted with crimson. The buildings lay in obliterated piles. Heavy smog chewed away the air. The stench of rot and human waste pervaded the perimeter. Clawing through the dense silence between varying intervals echoed a single vaguely masculine howl. Although spores ate away at anything resembling a dark corner, no infected made themselves immediately known.

Ellie slid down the mound to a floor that may have once flaunted sunny yellows and reds. She stepped silently between skeletal trees and bushes, cringing at each grating howl that resounded without clear origin.

Under a row of lifeless foliage, Ellie spotted a collection of discarded porn magazines, most of which were violently torn.

The more she wandered, the more the eerie howl ripped at her ears. The smoke cast harsh shadows over her. Her footsteps thundered like tribal drums, threatening to reveal her.

Her fear flourished. She stepped down, around, through the maze of dead trees and deader metal. A dangerous yet terrifyingly convincing thought surfaced in her mind: maybe if she put away her weapons, she wouldn’t worry as much. Maybe it would convince her that there’s nothing to be afraid of.

She swallowed. It felt like a rock. She hesitantly slipped her arrow back into her backpack and slung her bow around her shoulder. It didn’t help right away, but that dark thought told her it would soon.

An oppressive wave of heat rolled by, leaving bubbles of perspiration on her naked arms.

She walked, but felt as though she made no progress.

The howls grew in volume. But she felt no closer.

The same foggy vegetation and warped metal columns paralleled every path.

Then a gnashing shred burst out of the hedge next to her, a wet, fleshy noise. Ellie desperately wanted her bow, but that dark thought reminded her that it would only make her afraid. Yet her curiosity peaked, and she couldn’t help pushing through the brittle branches separating her from the howling.

She emerged in a circular clearing stained with blood and entrails. Bodies lay shredded, innards spilling out of fresh lacerations. Upon one body squatted a thick figure gripping clumps of meat moist with blood.

Ellie tore away from the dark thought and fumbled desperately for her bow and an arrow, but they clattered to the ground in her struggle, and the figure twisted toward her.

Its chalky eyes pierced through her for only a moment before diffusing into clear emerald irises.

           

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the hiatus. I kind of stopped caring about this story over Christmas break. I'll try to add a few more chapters to make up for it.


	17. Day Twenty-Three - The Mall of America Part 2

“Oh shit,” it said, dropping flesh through its fingers.

Ellie’s arrow aimed straight at—him? Its— _his_ —words were the only reason for her hesitation. “You… talk?”

“Yes, I talk,” he said, an Australian accent tilting his voice. He stared down at himself. “Fuck.” He scraped at fungal plates and claws on his hands to little effect. Boots, jeans, and a jacket, all muddy and bloodstained, covered all but his hands and head. Veins bulged on his neck and his skin carried a gray hue, but otherwise he appeared healthy. “Can I just say thank you for not—” He burst into a violent coughing fit thickly laced with the clicking of infected. Blood dripped down his lip.

Ellie was a statue.

“Oh bloody hell,” he said, recovering. “I realize how bad this looks. I, um. I can—”

“Were you with Nathaniel?”

His jaw dropped and his eyes widened. “Nathaniel—my god, yes, I was! Where is—”

“I’m here to rescue the rest of his group.”

His face hardened with regret. “You’re _aiming_ at the rest of ‘is group.”

Ellie relinquished the tension on the string but kept the arrow nocked. She glanced questioningly to the ground under them.

“Yeah…” He stammered. “Long story.”

“I’ve got time.”

“Uh. Here, this might be easier than tryin’ to recall everything.” He retrieved a handheld recorder from a back pocket and tossed it to Ellie. “Audio log. I don’t remember how far it goes back, but I know it covers… well, this. Name’s Hanson, by the way.”

Ellie pocketed it. “Where’s your radio?”

Hanson squinted, confused. “Why would you need tha—”

“I said, where’s your _fucking_ radio?”

He stared at her for a moment. “Right over here.” He stepped past her through the brush and led her down a shattered path to a pitiful encampment assembled with what little intact supplies existed in the mall. Snatching the radio up from a table and handing it to her, he knelt down by a bedroll and began loading nearby items into a ratty backpack.

Ellie wasted no time in switching on the radio. “Chloe? Chloe, are you there? Chloe, it's Ellie. From Mount Rushmore. Are you there?”

Hanson looked up. “You came from Mount fuckin' Rushmore? Jesus.”

Ellie ignored him. "Chloe, please answer me if you're there. I got to the Mall of America. I'm here, and I have the other radio. Like I told you.”

“She obviously ain't there.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Ellie said. But she gave up anyway.

He zipped up the bag partway. “One more thing we gotta grab before we get outta here,” he said, slinging the backpack over one shoulder and taking off down the path.

Ellie crept behind him, constantly wary of his questionable infected state.

Hanson’s presence seemed to have dissipated the ominous fog that had flooded her senses upon entering the amusement park. Perhaps the lack of howling had cleared an imaginary horror.

They entered the doll store Ellie had passed on her way in. Dolls stared from bent and dust-laden boxes, their limbs and accessories liberated over time from tape and twist-ties. From behind the check-out counter, Hanson lifted a suitcase, unzipped it, and transferred cans of food from it to his backpack.

“You don't have to worry about that. I have food,” Ellie said.

He shrugged, zipped it, and slung it over his shoulder. “Which way did you get in?”

“This way.” Ellie led him to the west entrance, her bow and arrow glued to her hands, and scaled the incline up to the opening. At the opposite wall, a sole clicker stumbled in the glass shards from the windows of a shop. She took aim, but her sightlines were partially obscured by the unaccommodating opening.

She slipped through, planted her feet on stable edges, and lifted her bow. She released, and the arrow darted down. The clicker twitched, and the arrow slipped by its head, the steel tip ringing against the doorframe behind it.

“Shit,” Ellie whispered, but as she grabbed for another arrow, her left foothold gave way, dropping her down the craggy incline to the clicker’s feet.

Shrill screams and brackish clicking galvanized her heartbeat and released the floodgates of adrenaline. Her bow momentarily forgotten, she drew and fired her pistol twice up into its jaw.

“Did you just fire a gun?” Hanson cried from the hole.

Ellie turned to see his demeaning expression upon her and the decumbent corpse. “I slipped, it attacked. Asshole.”

She set her hands down to stand, then stopped at the echo ricocheting off the hallways and unsettling the dust. Clicking. A horde.

“ _Oh, fuck_ …” Ellie’s vocal chords solidified.

A cannonade of mangled footsteps joined the chorus of clicking.

“ _Brilliant_ execution there. Couldn’t have fucked it up better myself,” Hanson chided.

Swarms of infected poured into the path from both sides, rolling over each other like calcified tank treads. Ellie jumped up, snatched her bow, and mounted the incline without care for footholds. The stampedes collided behind her with a mucilaginous concussion. Ellie dove through the hole, shoving past Hanson.

The two sprinted back into the park, then turned around.

“Will they be able to get through?” Ellie asked.

Hanson shot her a look. “Will they get thr—? That’s like asking if a bulldozer would topple an old barn door.”

The creatures began dripping out of the opening like hard water from a tap.

“Can you shoot?” Ellie asked.

“Well enough.”

“Fuck it. Here.” She tossed him the pistol and brandished her bow, and they dropped the clickers and runners as they gradually trickled in.

Then a bloater clogged the hole. Ellie took the opportunity to retrieve intact arrows, and Hanson pocketed the other magazines she’d given him.

Pressure built up against the bloater as infected stacked against the other side. Its head bulged and the single arm that stuck through stiffened. Amber liquid drizzled from its efflorescent head.

“Alright, I got an idea,” Hanson said.

“Love to hear it.”

“That thing’s about to blow. If I shoot it at the last moment, it’ll explode and make a bigger opening for us to get through.”

“ _And_ release all of those things on us.”

He stared at her. “You got a better idea? Besides, the explosion’ll take care of most o’ the surrounding infected.”

Ellie rolled her eyes.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” He knelt, taking aim, when Ellie grabbed his arm and handed him a nail bomb.

“Here. Use this. To make sure there’s an explosion.”

He nodded and took it. The bloater swelled and shuddered, the liquid beginning to spurt out rather than drizzle, then gave forth a roar. Hanson reeled back, then pitched—almost—but was interrupted with a second volley of clicking and coughing. The bomb clanked to the floor as he doubled over.

Ellie’s instinct drove her to the ground, projected her hand to the bomb, curled her fingers over the blades, pressed her palm into the points, slung the device at the blockade, recoiled from the slashes on her skin, and watched the explosion decimate the rubble.

A deluge of infected spilled in, flattening the shredded bloater.

Ellie pumped her legs like pistons, Hanson momentarily forgotten, away from the virulent tidal wave. A jungle of faded blue bars and crossbeams made up the crooked loop of a rollercoaster in Ellie’s sights. In the wreckage of the remainder of the ride, the loop was the highest point, balancing on a less-than-ideal number of supports.

She hurtled through the rusty fence, sending shards of metal clattering down, and sprung up to the beams in the loop. Hanson followed shortly behind, scaling the opposite side of the loop.

Infected pooled around the base, rocking the supports. Ellie and Hanson grasped tight to the outermost points of the loop like ladders and fired down upon the infected, slowing their ascent.

“Where the hell did they come from?” Ellie cried over the din.

“Satan’s arsehole, most likely!” He shouted back.

“Ha ha. You have any alcohol?”

He laughed, despite the fingers clawing at his legs. “You thirsty?”

“Do you have any or not?”

“Cover my arse for a sec.” He clamped his teeth around the gun handle and dug a hand into his backpack. It came out with a clear bottle. “Wonderful. Fresh out.” He slung the bottle into the nearest clicker’s cranium.

Ellie reached behind her only to snatch at air. “Fuck! I’m out of arrows!”

“Well shit,” Hanson said, loading the last magazine. He glanced up and down the rollercoaster. “I got an idea. It’s a stupid motherfuckin’ idea, but it’s an idea. Take this.” He tossed the pistol back to her, then spun his arms around, as though preparing to dive.

“Are you—”

“That’s _exactly_ what I’m gonna do.” He bounded from the metal, following a perfect arc through the air and drilling down through the air. Clickers congregated at his descent, providing a trampoline of inconsistent texture. At his rapid arrival, they swallowed him and swarmed into a pyramid atop him.

Ellie watched, her gun lowered, until Hanson burst from an edge of the pile, his body flailing with more savagery than any other infected present. He leapt from one’s torso to the next, rending the heads from bodies with his teeth alone, then plowing straight through chest cavities and extruding all manner of viscera.

It was only a matter of minutes before the horde lay consummately dismembered across the ground.

At that point Hanson collapsed to his knees, presumably returning to consciousness. Ellie slid down the bars and stood in front of him, meeting his eyes. Solid jade. “You okay?” She asked.

He gave forth some coughing and clicking amidst nodding. “Let’s go.”

           

         

         


	18. Day Twenty-Three - Rest Stop

They sprinted through the mall, retracing Ellie’s steps back through the skyway to the parking garage. But where the parking garage was, concrete rubble from an implosion now lay. Not a sliver of the truck was visible.

“Shit,” Ellie said.

“I assume you _had_ a plan.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious, for saving the day once again. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

“I’m just curious _what_ that plan was.”

“Well, once upon a time, there was a blue truck here packed with supplies. And now it’s probably a fossil.”

“Can’t you make another one o’ those bombs to clear some o’ this?”

“Okay, A: I have a dirty rag and half a scissors. And B: even if an explosion from a grenade could somehow make an impact in this, it might hit the truck or the supplies that were sitting _in_ the truck.”

“Well, fuck. Now what?”

Ellie sighed. “Looks like we’re walking.”

 

They pedaled south down the freeway on bikes salvaged from a shop half collapsed and half overgrown.

They rode at a moderate pace to prevent the crackle of pavement under their wheels from drowning out their conversation, which quickly turned from small talk and jokes to honest and emotional pasts.

The first night, they built a fire under the ruins of a rest stop isolated from residences, cities, or other locations potentially harboring infected. Ellie sharpened arrowheads as Hanson prodded at the fire.

“It’s funny,” Ellie said, looking up from her task. “The last people on earth are either your best friend, or your worst nightmare.”

Hanson chuckled. “I suppose at that point you got your optimists and pessimists perfectly exemplified. Or, maybe more to the latter’s liking, optimists and _realists_.”

Ellie’s gaze caught on the flames between them as she considered. “You know, maybe _we’re_ the realists.”

“Oh, and _they’re_ the optimists? Come on, you kiddin’?”

“Hey, they’re the ones fighting so hard to stay alive. But think about it. All the ‘good guys’ so far have been some kind of infected. Like it’s helped us realize something.” Ellie held up the jagged arrowhead in her hand, projecting a shadow image onto the wall behind her. She used her other hand to make arms and legs, creating a cartoonish clicker silhouette.

“Us?”

She pulled down her sleeve and rolled up her jeans leg.

“Wait, what? You’re immune?”

She nodded. “Basically.”

“Huh. Yeah, those don’t look too recent. Uh, what is it that we ‘realize’?” Hanson tossed his stick into the fire, watching Ellie’s shadow puppet.  

Ellie made the puppet twitch and jerk around, imitating an infected’s movements. “I don’t know. Maybe that we kind of take life for granted sometimes.”

Hanson stuck a tiny twig onto the edge of his finger with sap, and made a man’s likeness with shadow. The shadow man approached Ellie’s clicker, then swung with the twig; Ellie dropped the arrowhead as the shadows crossed paths, creating the image of a survivor decapitating a clicker. They smiled at their little show.

Hanson’s smile dropped. “Wait, you consider me a best fr—” He stopped, for no reason in particular.

“Well, sure. I mean…” She locked eyes with Hanson. “I swear to god, if you start making moves on me, I’m gonna shoot your fucking dick off.”

A rush of laughter escaped him, cut short by a succession of coughs and clicks. “No, I would never. I wouldn’t do that to anyone.”

“Glad to hear it. I suppose we oughtta get some sleep for tomorrow.” She put away the arrowhead and her knife.

He nodded. “Yeah. You got any rope?”

“For what?”

“I figure you won’t get any proper sleep with a half-monster loose in the same room as you.”

“You know, It just so happens that I might.” She dug in her backpack, her plans to tie him up once he had fallen asleep nullified, and her trust of him reinforced.

She brought out what rope she had and tied an intricate series of knots around his wrists and an exposed wood beam. “There,” she said. “G’night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

“Oh, they won’t.”

 

“Hanson Billings audio log, August someth—Actually wait, no, it’s prolly September by now. Hard to know without our calendar—no thanks to Keller. Anyway, today was the first day Nathaniel radioed without actually sayin’ anything. Nobody knew what the hell to think of it. Alex tried callin’ back several times, but still nothin’. My personal theory is that he somehow managed to butt-dial us.”

Ellie frowned at the sudden silence, holding the recorder closer to her ear to make sure she wasn’t missing something. Then the next entry began.

“Hanson Billings, September 2040. No call from Nathaniel today, at all. Group’s gettin’ a lil worried, but in the name of not assuming the worst, he probably either lost it or broke it or somethin’. Or maybe forgot. But it ain’t like him to forget.”

Ellie looked to the radio sticking out of her backpack and glanced between it and Hanson. She fast-forwarded on the player.

“—illings, September 2040. Enrique finally bit the dust today. We mourned, obviously, but I guarantee you everyone was breathin’ a sigh of relief inside that they wouldn’t have to split rations anymore with some sick chucklefuck that was clearly on his way out anyway.”

“I’m getting sick and tired of sayin’ the same shit over and over every time. I’m also not in the brightest o’ moods after all these recent deaths. Not that I cared about them—again, more food for us—but if people keep dyin’, it means there ain’t much hope left. We found Samantha on her mattress with her throat slit and a shard of bloodied glass in her hand. She’d scribbled a bunch of unreadable shit all over the floor around her. Lots o’ meaningless numbers an’ equations, and some words too, we think, but nobody could read her handwriting. Prolly shakin’ too bad or somethin’. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. What matters is, people are losin’ hope.”

She skipped ahead further.

“—is gettin’ less and less frequent. I should prolly stop callin’ it butt-dailing, ‘cause it’s pretty clear it ain’t accidental. I actually heard breathin’ from the other end today. Alex keeps tryin’ to make conversation—”

“—couple guys talkin' about who we'd eat first, if it came to it. From what I heard, it sounded like they'd be after Soren, the scrawny Swedish kid, since he don't pack enough muscle nor ingenuity to be useful. I feel like I oughtta report it to Alex, but honestly, if that's the only way to survive... I mean, sometimes survival takes precedence over morals, I guess.”

“—want to say this too loud for fear that someone’ll hear me, but I found a fuckin’ motherlode of food in a safe in the back room o’ the doll shop. The safe’s lock was busted, so I opened ‘er right up and there was just _stacks_ of canned food. It was glorious! I know it’s selfish to keep it to myself, but I can justify it: if we split it up, the entire group will eat it all much faster than one person. We’ll all die off at the same time. But if I keep it to myself, it’ll let one member of the group live until someone finds me or I find a way out. Everyone else’ll starve, yes. I understand that. But at least _someone_ ’ll still be here for a long while after.”

“I, uh. _Shit_. I don’t know what happened. I… I woke up, and most o’ the group was gone. There was nothing but blood n’ scraps left. And I had a motherfucker of a stomachache. I looked in the can of beans I ate, and saw something I must’ve missed because I was so hungry: spores. I don’t know what happened, but my best guess… I… I… _ate_ … them… the other group members… i-in some sort of infected… _state_. I have no idea why I’m back to normal now. I… _Holy fuck_. The others don’t know yet, thank Christ Almighty. They were at the other side of the park, and I just played dumb when they got back. I… I should probably check the other cans of food.”

The recording ended. Ellie stared intently upon Hanson’s backpack, loaded with the canned food presumably contaminated with more spores that would trigger his infected form. Hanson hadn’t opened his backpack since he loaded the food into it.

Ellie stepped around him and lifted the backpack with hardly a rustle. Sneaking outside and peeling down the zipper, she peered in, then recoiled from the thick scent. She zipped it back up, then sprinted to the tree line, using her momentum to trebuchet the backpack into the woods.

“And that was the last anyone heard of the evil clicker spirit hiding within Hanson,” Ellie said. “Were it not for those lucky thieves that happened to come by and loot them in the night, who knows what might’ve happened?” She snickered. “Well. Maybe those thieves really weren’t so lucky.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> READ THE ENTIRETY OF HANSON'S AUDIO LOG HERE: http://archiveofourown.org/works/5750533


	19. Days Twenty-Four Through Thirty - Interstate 35

Thin barriers of flesh and fabric were unforgivingly split between stone and spine as Ellie was grappled against the rest stop wall.

“WHERE THE FUCK IS MY BACKPACK?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!” She struggled against the vicelike hands at her neck and collar.

“BULLSHIT. What’d you do with it?”

“I didn’t fucking touch it! Last I saw, it was right fucking next to you!”

Gripping her shoulders, Hanson spun and pitched her onto the ground. The deformed ground chafed the raw gashes on Ellie’s back, making her cry out.

“Tell me what you did with it. Now.”

“Why would I do _anything_ with it?” Ellie lifted herself on hands and knees. “What did you have in there, porn?”

“Food. You saw me pack it.”

She pushed up to kneeling. “My best guess is thieves. Maybe it was raccoons. I don’t know.” She glanced to her backpack, its contents strewn. “Looks like my stuff got raided, too, so calm your fungus-encrusted tits.”

His eyes barricaded power, anger seeping out. “You knew.”

Her eyebrows caved in. “Knew about _what_?”

“I don’t have a clue how, but you found out. You found out why I insisted on takin’ my own food.”

“Okay, first off, I didn’t care. The more food, the b—”

“The audio recorder!” He blurted. “That’s how you knew. I explained it on there. You realized I was a threat, you got rid of the backpack, then you spilled your own shit to make it look believable.”

Ellie jerked from the heaviness of the subsequent heartbeat. “I…”

“I wasn’t plannin’ on hurtin’ you. I brought ‘em for… insurance. Or assurance. Whatever. A defense strategy, let’s call it that.” He dropped to sitting, arms over his knees. “Look, I… I understand why you got rid of ‘em. You don’t trust me. Can’t trust anyone these days. That’s fair. But we’re near dry on weapons. We got almost nothin’ to defend ourselves with. I figured, in the event we got nowhere left to turn…”

“Then you turn,” Ellie finished.

He stared at her. “I want that food back, Ellie.”

She stared at him. “No.”

“Excuse me?” He stood.

“If you don’t believe someone could’ve stolen our shit, what makes you think someone will attack us on the way to the village?”

“I’m just bein’ prepared. Where’s my damn food?” He snatched Ellie’s arm and yanked her to her feet.

“I don’t fucking know!” She felt a familiar handle hiding in her hand behind her leg. “Maybe people aren’t around anymore, but animals still are!”

Any residual anger conceded and dripped out from behind his tattered barricade. His fingers released, and Ellie’s blood filled in the handprint on her arm.

 

The next town had once been a modest outpost, though it had evidently seen its end before the infection had gotten well underway; the barricades and turnstiles were hardly more imposing than those at a theme park. Buildings showed signs of decades-past warfare, likely the result of countless panic-stricken trigger fingers. The air now was crystalline in sight and smell, meaning if there were any infected inhabitants, they wouldn’t be found outside the darkest of basements.

They dropped their bikes off at a turnstile. Quick scans of the buildings revealed nothing particularly useful. It wasn’t until Ellie saw in a house the dust outline from a lockbox that now sat empty and open on the other side of the kitchen counter that her heartbeat kicked up a step.

“Hanson,” she said.

He skipped down from upstairs and into the kitchen with her. “Ain’t shit up there. Find somethin’?”

“Someone’s been here recently.” She gestured to the outline. Barely a speck blemished the clean rectangle of granite countertop.

“Well. Explains why everything’s lifted already.”

“Let’s keep it quiet in case they’re still around.”

The backyard yielded nary a shard of live grass, having been canvassed by a colossal oak whose roots toiled at the extraction of a rotten fence. They crawled under and searched the next house up and down. They paused at the master bedroom, where the outer corner had been carved out by an explosive. The opening commanded a view of the rest of that side of the neighborhood. At the end of the street were a few figures in a transitory camp set up on a front lawn.

“Hanson, binoculars,” Ellie said, her gaze unmoving.

Hanson made circles with his hands and held them in front of Ellie’s eyes.

Ellie turned and gave him an eyebrow so high her disgust was practically tangible.  

“What? You think I have some just sittin’ around?”

She rolled her eyes and stared back at the group. She could just make out three men: one eating on a ragged sleeping bag, one doing push-ups, and one throwing jabs at a punching bag made from two rotting bodies strung together. None of them were wearing shirts.

“What is it?” Hanson asked.

“People.”

“People?” He swallowed. His stomach growled.

“Great timing.”

“Ellie, I…”

“What? Now’s really not the greatest time. There could be more anywhere, maybe right outs—”

He grabbed her shoulder. “Ellie, I don’t know any easier way to say this. I’m hungry for _them_.”

Ellie’s eyes gradually broadened from anger to fear.

“Look, I don’t know what to say. I’m part infected. Normal food just doesn’t do it for me.” The desperation in his face was a vacuum, tugging relentlessly at the sympathy locked away in her.

“How would you fight them?” She asked half-heartedly, not even meeting his eyes anymore.

“Ellie.”

She glanced down to see her left hand clasping her right wrist to her chest.

“I don’t know what happens if I don’t eat, and I really don’t want to f—”

Ellie stuck out her arm and yanked up her sleeve. “Just do what you have to do.”

Hanson tentatively caressed her arm, apparently unsure how to proceed. He brought his nose down over her bite, closed his eyes, and inhaled sharply. He coughed once.

“It doesn’t produce spores,” Ellie said. “That’s why it didn’t—”

Hanson clamped down with pseudo-contaminated ivories on a pinch of tainted skin and withdrew, drips of crimson trailing.

For the first time in a long time, Ellie screamed. It was a pained, hoarse sound, audibly dulled from years of disuse.

By the time she’d recovered and wrapped what was left of her hoodie around her wound, Hanson was halfway to the camp, flailing and jerking as he transformed into a monster. His pace intensified, and the trio snapped to attention. Firearms surfaced, bullets flared, and gunshots reverberated.

The group’s fire posed no hindrance to Hanson, and he took the closest man straight to the ground, rending the exposed flesh and coating himself in blood. The others showered him in more bullets, and he leapt from one to the last, sinking his teeth into both of their necks.

Ellie held her arm, her gaze slipping to the floor. Her worry that Hanson would simply run off fought with her hope for the same.

She turned and hurried down the stairs.


	20. Day Thirty-Six - Omaha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the late upload.

“Why do I let you do this?”

Hanson sat slouching opposite her, the licking fire occasionally covering the hands that held his bowed head.

“There are maybe a hundred people left in the world, and you’ve eaten twenty-one of them. Not counting the ones at the mall. How many were you with up there, anyway?”

He mumbled something.

“What?”

“I said I can’t help it.”

“That’s not a number.”

“I wasn’t answering your question.”

“Then answer the damn question.”

He inhaled and lifted his head. Murky imprints enveloped his eyes. “Eighteen. Eighteen when we got separated.”

“How many w—”

“Ellie, I’m sorry. I just don’t want to find out what’ll happen to me if I don’t—”

“No, _I’m_ sorry,” Ellie said, sitting up straighter. “I’m sorry for letting you kill a third of the last fraction of humanity. I’m sorry for throwing away your backpack. I’m sorry for not getting to you before whatever it is could get ahold of you. I…” Something tickled her cheek, and she brushed it off and her hand came away wet.

“Ellie,” Hanson began, pushing hair out of his face. “Ellie, it’s fine. Shit happens. Apologies ain’t gonna fix anything. If it’s gonna kill you not to, then fine, whatever, I accept your apologies and forgive you.”

She glared at him. “What did you say? Apologies can’t fix anything?”

“They can’t. They can only pad the blow.”

“Well that’s one way of looking at things.”

“Remember our last discussion over a fire? Where you said maybe _we’re_ the realists? What happened to that?”

“Realism doesn’t mean I hold onto grudges.”

“It also don’t mean that you have t—” he fell into a fit of coughing. Thirty seconds became two full minutes of hoarse coughs before he could speak again. “Fuck. Nevermind.”

Ellie shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what to tell you anymore. I’m sure you’ve tried animals; cooked or canned food doesn’t work—”

“Wait.” Hanson snapped up. “Oh, god, I’m so stupid.”

“What? Why?”

“I… I haven’t tried animals.”

“How have you not?”

He frowned. “I’ve been in a godforsaken shopping mall for god knows how long. Ain’t many animals coming through there.”

“Holy shit.” Ellie’s eyes widened. “Holy shit. Why the fuck didn’t we think of this before?”

“Well, problem is, same with people, there just ain’t as much animals left as there was.”

“Look at this fucking city. It may as well be a forest now. Besides, we haven’t exactly had too much of an issue finding _people_ to keep you from getting fucking withdrawal symptoms. So, assuming the ratio is the same…” She trailed off, leaving her conclusion implied.

A grin crawled up Hanson’s face. “Looks like we have some work to do.”

 

String snapped. Leaves rustled. The deer sprinted away.

“God fuckin’ dam—”

Ellie clapped her hand over his mouth. “Shush. It didn’t teleport to another fucking dimension. We just have to sneak up on it again. Come on.”

Hanson rolled his eyes but smirked, nocking another arrow. He followed Ellie up an exit ramp for a vantage point.

“Look. It’s right down there.” She pointed to an overgrown parking lot where the deer stood grazing.

Hanson violently yanked back the string and glared down at the deer.

“Whoa,” Ellie said. “Careful. That bow isn’t calibrated to you. Pull it back slow to your anchor point.”

He raised an eyebrow to her. “Anchor point?”

“The spot where you draw back to. To keep your aim consistent. I use my cheekbone.”

Hanson pulled the bow away from him, releasing the tension on the string. Miming the bowstring, he held the arrow’s fletching to his cheekbone. “Like this? Does it have to be on the face?”

“I don’t think so, but it helps. Easier to look down the arrow.”

He placed the arrow back on the string, drawing it slowly this time to his cheekbone.

“Now breathe in, and breathe out as you release it.”

He inhaled, every part of him unmoving except his chest. Ellie jumped when he let go.

The arrow sailed down and sunk into furry hide. The deer let out a cry, sprinted out into the street, and fell, the arrow jutting skyward from its shoulder.

“Nice!” Ellie held up her hand for a high-five.  

Hanson leaned over and planted a kiss on Ellie’s lips.

Ellie instantly kicked him back and drew her pistol at him. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I—Sorry.” He raised his hands in surrender and scooted back from her, his grin still stuck to his face. “Got a little caught up in the moment.” 

She rolled her eyes. “Sure.”


	21. Day Forty-Four - North Platte

The sign said North Platte.

Neither of them knew what state they were in.

But they had to be close now.

 

They drifted down blackened streets blurred by the torrential rain, between suburban houses that had all faded to the same color. They told jokes, and when they ran out, they made up their own. They shared stories, and when they ran out, they made up their own. They talked about old friends, and when they ran out, they made up their own.

         

Under the deck of a house were two animal skeletons. Most likely deer, wolves, dogs, something of that size, but decomposition hid any certainty. Hanson had been staring at them, but now meandered in the backyard. Nothing about their appearance particularly stood out.

Ellie slowly got to her feet and followed Hanson, taking one last glance to the bones before rounding the corner. Hanson was already in the next-door yard, half-heartedly picking around for tools or supplies.

It wasn’t until he stepped over a pair of sharp-looking gardening shears that she thought to ask something. “Hanson, you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He didn’t look at her.

They scoured the yards, the houses, the sheds, but Hanson continued overlooking things. Ellie finally stopped him as he stepped out of a shed without taking anything.

“Hanson, what the hell’s wrong?”

He frowned. “Nothin’s wrong. I’m fine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He rolled his eyes, sighing to the cloudy morning sky. “I’m just a little tired, maybe a little stressed, alright?”

Something compelled her to keep pressing. “Back there, with those dead animals under the porch… You were staring at them.”

He hesitated before speaking. “What animals?”

“The skeletons. Deer. Or wolves, or dogs, or whatever they were.”

“Oh,” he muttered. “I don’t know.” He tried to keep walking, but Ellie remained in his path.

“You know, we still have a ways to go before we get to my village. You can tell me. It’ll be easier on both of us.”

“Can we just go, for Christ’s sake? There’s nothin’ here anyway.”

Ellie reached around him and grabbed a clean spade from inside the shed and held it up. “You were saying?”

Hanson again rolled his eyes. But now his fists were clenched. “Look, I don’t feel like talkin’ right now.”

“Do you really want to hold onto it the entire way to the village?”

“It’s not a good idea to talk about it. Can we go, please?”

“Not until you tell me.”

He ran his hands up and down his face, and began pacing. “If this gets bad, it ain’t my fuckin’ fault, alright?”

“Just tell me.”

“Acknowledge that it won’t be my fault, will you?” He locked eyes with her.

“That _what_ won’t be your fault?” Ellie demanded. “I can’t agree to something like that if I don’t know what you’re so upset about!”

An agitated huff burst out his mouth. “Alright, for Christ’s sake, _alright_. The animals—your fuckin’ suggestion with the animals, that I could use _them_ instead o’ people? It didn’t—it doesn’t work. I’ve been fuckin’ starvin’ for days now. I didn’t say anything because I knew I’d upset you. So I just shut my mouth because I thought it’d be easier this way. And now… I’m startin’ to get really fuckin’ hungry.”

Ellie’s expression was a dark twist of fear and empathy.

“Ellie, I didn’t want anything to happen to you. I was tryin’ to protect you, and I just can’t anymore. Any fuckin’ minute now, I’m gonna go fuckin’ berserk and you’re gonna have to make one hell of a choice.”

She stared into his eyes. Eyes that were already growing unfamiliar. “What kind of choice?” She muttered. She wasn’t sure she wanted an answer.

“You’ve probably been in this apocalypse your entire goddamn life. You know exactly what kind of fuckin’ choice. The same damn choice all of us have to make these days at some point or other!” He gestured wildly with his arms, resuming his pacing.

Ellie tripped over things to say. “Maybe… Maybe if we hurry, we can find someone for you.”

“It’s too late, it’s too goddamn late.” He coughed. And coughed, and coughed, until it degenerated into hoarse clicking.

“There’s gotta be something we c—”

“Shut the hell up, you’re making it _worse_.” He leaned against a tree and sunk down, head in his hands. “I’m gonna fuckin’ turn any goddamn moment…”

“Hanson…”

“I’m so hungry, so damn hungry…”

“Hanson, listen to me!” She knelt down, hand on his shoulder. “We can fix this. Come on, stand up and let’s—”

He may have whispered something as she spoke, or it may have been crying, but whatever it was, she couldn’t hear it. He stared at her, disintegrating inside, his humanity pouring out in his tears. “Run.”

Her heart surged. Her mind and body tugged on the chains of her imprisoned soul, and the pressure of the turmoil collapsed the ducts behind her eyes. The floodgates shattered, and the chains slipped from her grasp. Blinded by her tears, she tripped and stumbled through yard after yard.

Shrieks from behind sent electricity through her bones. For a moment she felt frozen, but her feet never surrendered.

The ground quaked behind her. A malformed shadow devoured hers. The cry that emerged could hardly be contained in words. It clawed and scratched into her ears, devouring their interiors.

She swerved into a doorway where the door hung dislocated on its hinges, into a kitchen nearly melted, and the beast charged in after, knocking the refrigerator onto the wood floor with a crisp crack. Ellie swung around a railing, propelling herself downstairs and almost headfirst into a murky pool.

The basement was a veritable swamp, the water so tainted that its depth was indiscernible, with no help from the rain dripping through every corner of the house. Her hesitation cost her, as the beast dove down, its hand snagging the back of her skull and grinding her face along the exposed splinters of the wooden railing.

They submerged into thigh-deep ink. The liquid paralyzed her. If her head was released, it was impossible to tell. The only thing she could feel was her knife’s handle. There was pressure in front of her, a limb reaching out, then on her neck. She drove the knife into where she felt the spatial distortion, and something recoiled.

She burst above the surface, gasping greedily, but still couldn’t open her eyes. Violent splashing sent waves at her, and she drew her pistol and fired several times into the chaos. No different sounds returned.

It struggled to its feet, letting loose a cry infused with raucous clicking. She fired again, but either she missed or it made no impact. Inhuman hands seized her body, slamming her against the wall. She felt every angle of every item in her backpack scraping away the flesh along her spine. Her arms fell to her side, letting the backpack drop into the water before being compacted against the wall again. Her clothes tore, and a mix of blood and water simultaneously warmed and chilled her back.

Once more it drove her against the brick. Weight left her head for a second, and then returned in time for her to feel herself being heaved into the adjacent brick wall.

She could hardly move. Half of her face was covered in the murk, but the impact must’ve cleared her eyes, because she could make out distinct shapes again. A horizontal strip of something white shone from the ceiling, and she realized that the fridge had broken through the weakened floor. It appeared seconds away from simply collapsing through.

The beast stood directly underneath it. Ellie raised the pistol and shot at the broken flooring. But no bullet came out.

The beast charged and pounced her. She went completely under, and no amount of flailing with her knife held off the cuts and bruises. The water was so thick she couldn’t tell where the pain was coming from, until teeth clamped down upon her shoulder.

Adrenaline surged through her, in one pulse pushing bubbles out her mouth, in another springing her head to the surface to refill her lungs. Her vision was again impaired, though hardly as bad.

A hand swung and impaled itself upon her knife. She pushed it further, until it nailed the hand to another part of the beast’s body, then she dove away from the wall. She twisted and squirmed back onto her feet and leapt up to the crack in the ceiling, digging her fingers into the waterlogged subfloor.

Her weight brought the floor down to a sharp angle, pouring down the rainwater that had pooled there and freeing the refrigerator. The beast lunged. The fridge slid and crushed her fingers, then fell upon Hanson’s lower half.

Hardly a grunt escaped him. Ellie let go of the flooring and nearly lost her balance upon hitting the ground. She turned, and Hanson’s eyes were no longer his own. There was no Hanson left. It was just another clicker, flailing madly, nearly tearing its own torso in two.

A cinderblock sat under the water next to her leg. She gripped it tight in both crushed and bleeding hands, lifted it above the grimy water and above her head, letting it drizzle down over her quivering frame, and swung. And swung again. And swung a third time. And swung into rhythm. And the only sound was a dismal song of splashing, hiding a resonant impact within each note.


	22. Day Fifty-Two - West

Whether her actions had fully sunken in or not made little difference, as she knew what had happened and knew there was no going back. She made no attempt to justify anything nor guilt herself over it.

The rain only ever paused for the clouds to take another breath with which to exhale more rain.

Her footsteps carried her down habitual paths, and only upon looking up did she realize where she was.

In front of her was the village wall. Its silence was unnerving, as though she expected it to embrace her. But if it were once a naïve and exuberant child, it was now an adult hardened by the death of its loved ones. She wanted to feel relief when she touched it, but it only felt cold and wet on her fingertips.

Then the concern set in. Nathaniel and his company were gone. She knew she could likely find traces of their stay in the woods just outside the village, but her stress couldn’t yield to focus for long enough. Ellie circuited the village twice over, as though in the hopes that evidence of some sort would bypass her stress by its own volition.

“Jonah,” she called, her scorched throat nearly dissolving the name before it left her mouth. “Jonah,” she tried again, “open the gate.”

The crackling of raindrops on saturated leaves absorbed any response that might’ve come. A minute of waterlogged silence left her shivering, until one of the gates began its crawl outward. Behind it was a man shrouded in sodden clothing, a wide hood shadowing his features. It wasn’t the Jonah she knew.

He cast barely a glance at her before turning around and climbing up the watch platform.

Ellie strode in, her legs heavy and hesitant. None of the few who stood under the awnings of the buildings were familiar. If their gaze touched her, it was only to notice that a girl stood in the rain. Their acknowledgment bore no further judgment.

In the middle of the street leading to Tommy’s house, something brighter than the mud shone through the rain. She walked up and pulled it out with a murky squelch. A moss-green teddy bear met her eyes with its remaining one, water flowing into and out of the indentations on its face.

A figure emerged from one of the houses, joining her on the street.

“Well, would you look at that,” Nathaniel said as he approached. “You came back.”

“Where is everyone?”

“Where’s my proof?”

The bear dropped back into the mud beside her. She took off her backpack, reached in and grabbed the radio, and flung it at him. It hit his arm and splashed into the muck. He picked it up, shaking the sludge off, and inspected it.

“And the others?” He asked, glancing up.

Ellie hiked her backpack back onto her shoulders. “Take a wild fucking guess.”

He nodded, the rain covering any emotion on his face. “I should have expected.” He turned the radio over in his hands. “What did you find when you reached the mall?”

“Where’s the goddamn village?”

“We kicked them out. They’re gone. Moved out. Evicted. And we didn’t hurt a single one of them. No pushing, no shoving, no trouble. We showed them our guns and our numbers, and we sent them off with some food and other provisions.”

Ellie shook her head. “You’re so full of shit.”

“Honey, I’ve told you, I’m the most honest man I know. I haven’t uttered a single lie to you.”

“That’s the third one I’ve counted.”

His face crumpled. “Third? But I—”

“Hanson got infected from a secret food stash that was full of spores. Then he turned, and ate the rest of the group. This was all on his personal audio recorder.” She watched his gaze fall. “I did what had to be done.”

He gave a single, solemn nod. “I understand.”

Ellie stepped up to him. “Let me see your hand.”

“What?” He asked, but held up his right hand regardless.

She took his hand and snapped out her knife, then severed his index, middle, and ring ringers.

He dropped to his knees, soaking his jeans, and let out a single curse. He dug his bleeding hand deep into the folds of his coat.

“I’m sorry, do honest deals not apply to honest men?”

He glared at her, teeth clenched.

“Oh that’s right. You’re not an honest man, are you? Oops.” She eyed the area, seeing nothing but empty porches and closed-up houses. “I just need one more truth from you. Where did you send my village?”

“I didn’t send them anywhere. They went west. Ask Graham, the guy at the gate. He’ll tell you the same thing.”

“My sincerest thanks,” Ellie said, and kicked him down into the mud before heading back to the gate.

 

Graham only pointed west when asked. Ellie took a step, but then turned back to him. “Did… did a thin, blonde girl with freckles and a shotgun come by here at all?”

Graham stared for a moment, then nodded and pointed in the same direction.

 

Chloe slogged through the softening rain, shotgun dragging beside her. There was no mistaking her.

“Chloe,” Ellie said.

She snapped around, then dove into Ellie’s arms. “Oh my god,  Ellie.” Without releasing her grip, Chloe pulled her head away to look her over. “Holy shit, are you okay? What happened? Where’s your village? I’ve been looking for days, and—”

Ellie interrupted her by pulling back into the embrace. “Chloe, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you.”

“No, _I’m_ sorry. I should’ve come with you. You were right. My family was long gone.”

Ellie finally began to let go. “So is mine.”

“What do you mean?” Chloe tucked soaking wet hair behind Ellie’s ears.

“You found my village. Except Nathaniel lied to me and kicked everyone out. So they’re out there somewhere, looking for a place to stay.”

Chloe immediately began storming back east, shotgun gripped tight. But Ellie grabbed her arm.

“Chloe, don’t.” Ellie met her eyes with what she hoped was pleading for mercy.

“I haven’t fired a single shell from this thing, because nothing’s deserved it till now.”

Ellie took her hand from the handle. “It’s not worth it.”

Chloe stared off to the east.

“There’s a new life ahead of us. I know it’s cheesy, but things are different. Maybe they didn’t have to be, but they are now and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t fix everything. I already took care of Nathaniel. I only did what needed to be done. Come on, let’s go find home.”

She sprung out in quiet tears. “I’m so sorry.” They both wiped at her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Ellie. I just need you to tell me that it was all worth it. Everything up to this point. I don’t even care if it’s true or not, I just need to hear the words. Just say them for me, please. Then we can go.”

Ellie looked at her with tears at her own eyes, already knowing what the next words out of her mouth really meant. “Chloe... I think it was worth it.”


End file.
